p 



M^ 









±1^ 



m^m 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

Shelf .lirir; t ^ 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



■:?1 










^'•<«v''' Z.^^A.-<>i-' v-'i<?YC^ yO 






^^'^S\ ^A^ , ^fl." 



u ^-^^^*:^aHbss^>sd< fck.^ ^^! 












,lii^^ 






^y^\t^m\^ 



^ — N^ — a_ - \^_ft: — \ -4^ ---^K- — ^ — 



f-«r Ts e-v» 1PI r-i' -^n '^7'v T^-J i-w ^n ptr Ti f-)-" ''ir» rv 



»-. r »* -»x mmu- mara run, 3w ■ «»,, -«. » *«». «.-i v«™- x-™« i.m«- inaa «*-.v- -cavil iiry i^H j-fj^ •q^Ij p^r 

— ^V- ^k— — ^s, -^jjfc 






®dib^^il£i^ 







National Suicide 



AND ITS 



PREVENTION. 



^ BY 

OSCAE F. LUMEY, PH. D., 

FOR THIETY-ONE YEARS PROFESSOR OP ANCIENT LANGUAGES IN 
WHEATON COIiliEGE. 



^ 






^^ 



"Righteousness exalteth a nation but sin is a reproach to any 
people." 






>y/M^^ 



Of 



WASHl 



CHICAGO: 
GEOEGE F. CEAM. 

1886. 



!■! 



»*%1 



^'Bid if they will not obey, I will utterly pluck 
up and destroy that nation, saith the Lord.'' 

— Jeremiah. 



Copyrighted, 1886, by Osoab F. Lumey. 




POLITICO ECONOMIC TREE. 



PEEFACE. 



In the midst of the arduous labors of the teacher's pro- 
fession, j:he chapters of this book have been written piece- 
meal. 

This circumstance, and the" fact that all except five 
chapters were written as articles for the American^ a news- 
paper published in the nation's capital, will account for 
the repetition of some statements that seemed necessary to 
a proper understanding- of the several subjects. 

Hoping that it will help somewhat to rouse a spirit of 
investigation into subjects of very great importance to 
the American people, this little volume is sent forth upon 
its mission. 

OSCAR F. LUMRY. 
Wheaton College, May 19, 1886. 



OOIfTTENTS. 



OHAFTEB. 

I. Introduction . . ' 7 

II. Measure or standard of value 14 

III. Specie base .... 34 

IV. What is honest money 43 

V. Our national banks 52 

VI. How panics are or may be made .... 61 

VII. How panics are mended 70 

VIII. Paper money 80 

IX. Legislation against the poor 86 

X. Repudiation 97 

XI. How Wall street manipulated the United 

States Treasury in its own interest . . 114 

XIT. Blind leaders of the blind 123 

XIIT. Usury 135 

XIV. Endowment 167 

XV. Land tenure 177 

XVI. Eailroads and other monopolies .... 189 

XVII. The tramp 198 

XVIII. Poverty, irreligion, immorality drunken- 
ness and crime 201 

XIX. When is money plenty 208 

XX. Conclusion 215 



INTRODUCTION. 



CHAPTEE I. 

As an educator of American youth, who from 
the exigencies of his situation has had to give 
careful attention to some of the questions that 
concern men in their social and civil relations, I 
feel in duty bound to leave to my children, my 
pupils, my fellow Christians, and the world, some 
facts that I have gathered and some views based 
upon them, which in my humble judgment are 
material to the well being of all. I covet for 
them, not unquestioned acceptance, but the most 
searching and careful criticism. However things 
may seem, the real interests of no man can be pro- 
moted by error. 

The despot who has fastened a chain to the 
neck of his fellow, has seen the other end of the 
same chain, by some mysterious power, clasped to 
his own neck, and dragging himself and his own 
down to the level of the victims of his greed for 
pelf or power. God is a God of justice, and in 



8 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PEEYENTION. 

the outcome will see that justice prevails. If pro- 
fessed Christians wish to stand in that day, they 
must see to it that they too are on the side of 
justice. A glance at human affairs will reveal the 
fact that in our legislation and the administration 
of our laws, justice is very seldom considered at 
all. In theory, our legislators represent the 
people, but in fact, they have come to represent 
great moneyed interests whose only care for the 
people is to fleece them as closely as possible. It 
is the old story of the innocent sheep asking the 
wolves to protect them. 

As the papacy governs and impoverishes the 
masses of that communion by teaching them that 
they are not able to understand the great ques- 
tions that pertain to the other life, so the priests 
of Mammon, in this once free country, by means of 
the press which they control, and an annual 
Congress whose grave utterances are supposed to 
contain the concentrated wisdom of ages on the 
subject of money, have taught and are teaching 
the masses that they cannot understand such 
questions. They teach that the men, who, refus- 
ing to obey God's command to earn their bread in 
the sweat of their brows, know how to transfer the 
earnings of the laborer to their own coffers by 
means of usury, bonds and mortgages and the 
tricks of the money changers, by which they make 
the currency that must transfer all commodities at 
one time plenty, and scarce at another, and thus 



INTRODUCTION. 9 

determine what share of his own earnings the pro- 
ducer shall have, and what they will take for 
themselves, are the only men who are competent 
to direct and conduct the financial affairs of the 
nation. 

These gentlemen are the descendants in line 
direct of those whom the Saviour drove out of 
God's temple, calling their place of business a den 
of thieves. They have not only re-entered God's 
house and given law to His church and ministers 
as they did then, but have entered the temple of 
liberty, and usurped the very throne of her 
sacred majesty. Their boasted knowledge, when 
tested, has always proved to be merely a knowl- 
edge of how to pile up money for themselves, at 
other people's expense. That one of their number 
who was summoned before the most aristocratic 
political club of Boston, to refute the positions of 
a champion of rational finance, is a fair represent- 
ative of the whole of them, so far as scientific 
knowledge of the principles of finance is concerned. 

"The fact is," said he, "I know nothing about 
the philosophy of money. I know how to amass 
money." He was a millionaire. "I suppose it 
follows the law of supply and demand." I pro- 
pose to look into the history made by these men's 
management of the country's finances, and show, if 
possible, why v/e are, where we are, socially, finan- 
cially, industrially and religiously. A candid 
article, in a recent contemporary review, on the 



10 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREYENTION. 

condition of England's farming poor, by a clergy- 
man of the established church, shows how in the 
country districts, the men who have come to 
inherit the green earth, God's gift to men, not to 
a few nobles titled or untitled, ignore and dis- 
regard the pressing wants of God's suffering poor; 
and how, lest their miserable huts in which they 
are crowded like cattle, both sexes and all ages 
into single living rooms, should be in the way of 
the chase or should remind their callous and sor- 
did owner of his duty to their occupants, they 
have been removed so that the very servants 
necessary to keep their estates in order must find 
a place to live on the estates of others. 

The writer then shows how, for the relief of 
these oppressed and robbed ones, the clergy have 
organized charities, and sought in every way to 
relieve their wants and have at last come to be 
regarded with suspicion by the very persons they 
have sought to help. The cause of this apparently 
strange phenomena is then gi /en, which is simply 
this: They are beginning to cry for justice in- 
stead of charity, for their right to the means of 
living, which the very gift of existence implies. 
God hears the ravens. Will he not hear the cry 
of his own, whom accursed avarice has made 
poorer than ravens? 

Well may England's noblest statesman say, as 
he did in a recent letter to a French statesman, "I 
cannot help thinking that Europe is marching to 



INTRODUCTION. 11 

a great catastrophe. The crushing weight of her 
military systems cannot be indefinitely supported 
with patience, and the population driven to despair 
may very possibly, before long, sweep away the 
personages who occupy thrones, and the pretended 
statesmen who govern in their names." And the 
venerable Bishop Peck of the M. E. church, when 
on the verge of the grave, the time when men 
grow prophetic, breaks out in language like this: 
"Agitation and conflict are inevitable. This is no 
child's play. It will be the attempt of moral 
principle to break down the power of untold con- 
solidated millions of money, to challenge and defy 
the most enormous class interest which ever 
trampled upon a free people. It will be the most 
terrible conflict ever known upon this continent." 

Why cannot our own clergy take a lesson from 
the experience of their English brethren? They 
are accustomed to get together, and among other 
things to discuss how to reach the laboring classes 
which are manifestly getting more and more 
beyond the reach of their influence. Manifestly 
when they cease to be like the Scribes and Phari- 
sees supported by their oppressors, and become 
like their professed master, their friends and the 
defenders of their rights, the common people will 
hear them as they did Him, gladly. 

How much influence, to draw poor laborers to 
trust in and love her Saviour, has the Christian 
wife of the merchant prince, or of the great manu- 



12 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

facturer, who scatters her charities with lavish 
hands, whose husband to increase the store whence 
they are taken, cuts down the wages of his em- 
ployes till the girls have to sell their virtue to 
dress well enough to keep their places, and the 
young men have to steal to do the same? Yet 
every great city can furnish you plenty of such 
examples. 

Recent statistics of fifty-six leading kinds of 
business in New York, show that the pay of laborers 
is on an average $1.25 per day, while that of the 
employers is $20. Now notice, this was the pay 
while actually at work, and large numbers can 
only get work part of the time; that it is the 
average pay, and skilled laborers get several times 
that amount, common laborers having to take pro- 
portionately less ; that the mere pittance received 
by the common laborer must support not only 
himself and those dependent on him while he 
labors, but when he cannot get labor to do, when he 
or his are sick or out of employment, must pay 
enormous rents for miserable quarters to live in 
and heavy prices for necessities — ^the result of 
monopoly. 

In view of such facts, shame on the Christian 
minister or professed reformer that can pervert 
the scripture by quoting in justification of such 
monstrous oppression the words of the Master 
when he said, "the poor ye have always with you," 
or can say the laborer would be well enough off if 



INTRODUCTION. 13 

he would let whiskey and tobacco alone. Doubt- 
less many could live in comfort but for these, yet 
the fact is, "Man's inhumanity to man makes 
countless thousands mourn." But the greatest 
cause of human oppression, and not the only, but 
the mightiest and most far reaching, and yet from 
its slow and hidden working the one entirely un- 
observed by the mass of men, and known only to 
those who make the subject one of careful and 
prolonged study, (whether for the purpose of 
science, or to take advantage of their knowledge to 
enrich themselves at the expense of others, ) is the 
manipulation of the currency, making its column 
at one time high and at another time low. It 
makes no difference whether this is done by law 
or by hoarding and thus diminishing the amount 
in circulation. 

In these articles I shall have no quarrel with 
men. All that the men engaged in many human 
callings know about them is that the law allows 
them, and that they can make money by them. I 
do not assume to sit in judgement upon the men; 
to their own master they must stand or fall, I shall 
deal only with principles which I shall aim to apply 
to the acts of men. If any of the statements of 
this article seem erroneous, please reserve judg- 
ment until the evidence is all in. To clear up 
some questions which befog the public mind, 
before entering upon the discussion of the main 
questions, I shall try to explain some much abused 
terms and phrases. 



CHAPTEE IL 

MEASURE OR STANDARD OF VALUE. 

No more deceptive or misleading phrases than 
the above have found their way into the science of 
political economy. In the sense in which it is 
commonly understood, there is no such thing as a 
measure of value. At the time of the transfer of 
value there is no such process as measuring it in 
any sense similar to the measurement that takes 
place in the case of articles that have length and 
weight. The value has been previously not meas- 
ured but estimated or calculated in the units of 
some currency established by law. 

In the last analysis the law determines all other 
measures just as really as that of value. You may 
dispute the measure or weight of the merchant 
and his yard stick or weights will not settle the 
case. No material in nature that has length or 
weight will do it. Nothing will do it but the law; 
— but the law is abstract in its nature, and in these 
two measures must have some material substance 
to represent it, and make its application possible, 
but it is entirely immaterial what that substance 
is, so that it has in the one measure — length; and 
in the other — weight. 

14 



MEASURE OR STANDARD OF VALUE. 15 

The statement, found in the books, that it takes 
length to measure length and weight to measure 
weight, and therefore value, and by that they 
mean some material substance that has value — to 
measure value, needs only, to show its f alacy, to be 
supplemented by that other measure that would 
in a similar way, require us to say that it takes 
content to measure content, which they generally 
manage to forget. It only takes a basket of a 
given capacity that has been fixed by law, to meas- 
ure a bushel of turnips, not another bushel of tur- 
nips or of anything else of like nature. 

The every day experience of mankind contra- 
dicts the statement of Dr Gregory, that as in an 
exchange money takes the place of one of the com- 
modities, "it must be a commodity." His own 
statement discredits the same where he admits 
that 95 per cent, of the exchanges in New York 
are made without any money, and it becomes still 
less credible when you discover that less than two 
per cent, of the remaining five, and in times of 
suspension of specie payment, none of them are 
made with money that is a commodity. Unlike 
length and weight, value belongs to things 
material and things not material, and any of the 
things to which it belongs, as in the case of the 
other measures usually named, may measure it. 

Value is of two kinds. One is the result of 
nature's law coupled with the labor and conven- 
tional arrangements of men, and the other is 



16 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

purely legal. One of these is just as real a value 
as the other, else is the man cheated who has parted 
with gold or a farm, or anything else that has 
value, and has received instead a note or mortgage 
or greenback. A note of hand or mortgage does 
not have to be of the same kind as the gold or the 
farm for which it is exchanged to have value, and 
its value is not simply the value of the paper on 
which it is drawn, but is just as great as that of 
the number of gold dollars for which it calls, or, 
if the dollars be not paid, the farm which it covers 
and will take. Nay, it may be much greater than 
the farm, for though the number of dollars may 
not be increased, except by interest, their value 
may be and very often is largely increased and the 
value of the farm proportionately or it may be in 
a much greater degree lessened. 

The whole value of the note or mortgage is given 
by the law that underlies them. If the law has 
such marvelous power that it can endow a piece of 
paper in the hands of a usurer with the power to 
represent his ducats or his farm, and draw interest 
on the same, can it not endow another piece of 
paper in the hands of the laborer or merchant with 
the power to transfer his property or pay his 
debts, — the two simple powers of money ? It is 
idle to say that the piece of paper in the one case 
has value because the law is behind it, but has not 
in the other when the same power is behind that. 
Neither is it the dictate of reason to covet and 



MEASUEE OE STANDAED OF VALUE. 17 

pile up the one class of papers to increase one's 
riches, and distrust and destroy the other because 
some knave who wants to cheat the masses for his 
own advantage, or donk-ey, who does not know any 
better, has whispered "fiat" in one's ears. 

In the case of one of these kinds of paper the 
property of one legal individual is obligated, — in 
the other the property and authority of the nation. 
Bear in mind that in every case the real measure 
is in the law and not in the material used; — that 
measuring, or rather computing value, is a differ- 
ent thing from transferring values;-— that com- 
modity value is not necessary to a common medium 
since other than material things have value, and, 
as in the case of the other measures may measure 
value, and that most exchanges, and in times of 
the suspension of specie payments, all of them, 
are made without the use of anything that has 
commodity value. 

As the law fixes the standard of value — that is, 
the volume of currency — and may take for that 
purpose anything that has value, so law deter- 
mines absolutely the common medium that not 
only may but must transfer all values in the 
absence of a transfer of credits or barter of com- 
modities. This common medium must have value 
or it is a cheat — ^but this value may be either nat- 
ural, or as it is called intrinsic, or legal. In either 
case, its value, or rather office as money, is that of 
a substitute, and is purely legal. 



18 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PEEVENTION. 

The eminent English, bankers, Baring brothers, 
are responsible for the statement that after Eng- 
land demonetized gold in India, 20,000 pounds of 
that metal had not the power to command a single 
shilling in money. — What took away the money 
power of gold ? Law. What gave that power in 
the first place ? Law. Who then is so blind as 
not to see that the money power was in the law, 
not in the gold ? The conclusion to which we are 
driven by the facts in the case is this: — Law 
chooses some one or more of the things that have 
value either material or legal, and men estimate or 
calculate the value of all other things in the units 
of this one. Law transfers values by means of 
anything it has chosen to use as a substitute for 
material or other values. 

Money value and commodity value are entirely 
distinct. They may, but ought not to, both exist 
in the same material, since commodity value inter- 
feres with and often greatly damages money value, 
which, from the power which it alone possesses of 
forcing all contracts, paying all debts and trans- 
ferring all commodities, and canceling all money 
obligations of whatever sort, is almost infinitely 
more important and the injury done it is often 
irreparable, and, as many of the ablest thinkers 
from Aristole down to the present time have 
taught, and as I shall try to prove both by reason 
and experience, is entirely needless. 



MEASUKE OR STANDARD OF VALUE. 19 

The inch, and the pound, the units of weight 
and measure, are invariable, without which quality 
they would be worthless as measures. They 
measure at all times and for all persons in the 
same way, and hence measure justly, but will 
anybody, capable of thinking at all, claim the same 
for gold or silver? Why not, if either or both of 
them are proper measures or standards of value? 
Let us inquire why this difference. It lies simply 
in the quantity in proportion to the needs for it, of 
the material used by which to apply the law, 
which is in every case the standard. 

The quantity of the material out of which yard 
sticks or pound weights or pint cups are made is a 
matter of no consequence whatever, but if the law 
chooses one material, as gold or silver, and gives 
it the sole power of money, the quantity of that 
material becomes a matter of the very last impor- 
tance. To become satisfied of this, one has only to 
read the special pleading of the champions of 
gold, to prove in the face of the world's history to 
the contrary, that the quantity of that material is 
sufficient for the money of the world. And that, 
too, when they cannot help knowing that its 
quantity in any one country is entirely contingent 
on the varying natural yield of its mines; — on the 
needs for it in other countries; — the need for 
other things in that one country; — the continu- 
ance of confidence in that one country, and some- 



20 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

times in other countries, and tlie will to make or 
refrain from making corners in it by gold 

gamblers. 

When, in any country, from any cause, confi- 
dence fails and money is needed most, being a 
valuable and a very portable commodity, gold is 
hoarded or flees to other countries, thus destroy- 
ing the currency of the country, of which it is the 
whole or the base, and with it the values of every- 
thing, except debts and fixed obligations, the pro- 
portional value of which it greatly enhances. In 
speaking of the effects of the contraction of the 
currency in England, in 1821, to return to specie 
payments after twenty years of great prosperity 
during the suspension of the same, Alison, in his 
history of Europe, says: 

"It is within bounds to say that the whole loss 
was above ^500,000,000. * * * It was brought 
about solely by one cause — the drain of specie. 
The want of one species of property, but which 
under our monetary laws, like air to the indi- 
vidual, is indispensable to national life. And. it 
might have been entirely avoided, had the mone- 
tary laws permitted the issuing of another species 
of property to sustain the currency when the one 
on which all depended was withdrawn; and had 
the issue of £8,000,000 of bank notes by the bank, 
with no gold to pay them, which arrested the 
panic when at its height, been permitted by the 
law at an earlier period, so as to prevent it." 



MEASURE OR STANDARD OP VALUE. 21 

No amount of currency is enough for a country 
tliat is not sufficient to readily pay all money 
obligations and transfer all commodities that are 
at any one time for sale, without reducing prices 
so as to injure the producer or the debtor. In 
every permanently prosperous country the amount 
of the money must increase in proportion to the 
increase of population and the increased needs 
for it from other sources. If at any time it falls 
below this, not always immediately but with un- 
erring certainty, the distress of both the above 
classes begins and continues with ever increasing 
intensity, until it is relieved either by an in- 
creased supply of specie, or oftener by a liberal 
issue of paper not based on specie, or by a greatly 
lessened amount of business or property for whose 
transfer it is needed. 

Gold and silver, from their limited and uncer- 
tain supply, never have constituted and never can 
constitute such currency in whole or in part, 
unless their place, when they fail, be supplied as 
a substitute for, not as a representative of them. 
It is agreed by all great writers on the subject, 
that the price of all kinds of property and service 
is fixed by the amount or volume of currency. No 
imaginary measure or standard measures the 
value, but the volume of the whole currency of a 
country fixes the price of each commodity for that 
country, except in case of commodities sold 
abroad. 



22 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

Gold and silver, between nations, are the com- 
modities in which balances of trade are paid. 
Hence, their price for each country is often not 
fixed by its own, but by the currency of the coun- 
try of which it is the debtor. A money of the 
nations is impossible and undesirable in the pres- 
ent state of the world. Even a small decrease in 
the amount of a currency often makes a very 
large decrease in the valuation of property and 
labor, and while enabling the creditor to take 
what he chooses, ruins the debtor and the laborer. 

If this be so, and facts are abundant to prove it, 
where is the common sense in the toiling millions 
of this country who must bear all its burdens, 
listening to the unasked advice of the creditor 
class who would forever enslave them by, instead 
of increasing, as they ought, the amount of 
money, striking out of existence all the paper 
money, — national bank bills are not money, — and 
then destroying the silver which is near one-half 
the balance. When have this class proposed 
money measures that were not intended to in- 
crease their gains? With one terrible fiat they 
would sweep out of the country more than half its 
debt-paying money, and then have the cheek to 
throw dust in people's eyes by laughing at fiai 
money. Surely if fiat can thus sweepingly de- 
stroy money, it must be competent to the task of 
making it. 

The working of the vicious system, for which 



MEASUEE OR STANDARD OF VALUE. 23 

these men contend, has in England, the country 
from which they get their ideas of finance, in fifty 
years lessened the number of real property hold- 
ers from 150,000 to 60,000 and the process has 
continued until now 30,000 Englishmen can turn 
all the other millions into the streets and starve 
them to death for all of any right they have in 
the earth that God gave to men. 

Please remember in conclusion: 

1st. There is no measure of value in the sense 
of other measurements. 

2d. If there were any, gold or silver or both 
from their nature cannot justly measure value. 

3d. In all measurements the law, not the mate- 
rial substance, is the standard. 

4th. So far as there is any measure of value, 
the quantity of currency is such measure since it 
alone fixes the price of all commodities or services. 

Quantity of currency, while fixing the price of 
all commodities and services, determines the 
value of money itself. John Stuart Mill says, 
"We have seen, even in the case of metallic cur- 
rency, the immediate agency determining its value 
is its quantity. If the quantity could be arbitra- 
rily fixed by authority, the value would depend 
upon the fiat of the authority and not on the cost 
of production." 

Adam Smith says, "By properly limiting the 
supply of paper declared to be legal tender, its 
value may be sustained upon par with gold or any 



24 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

other commodity." Hicardo says of paper money 
"though it has no intrinsic value yet by limiting 
its quantity, its value in exchange is as great as 
an equal quantity of coin." 

Prof. McCulloch says of money of whatever 
material made, "it is yet possible by sufficiently 
limiting its quantity to raise its value in exchange 
to any conceivable extent." 

The first $70,000,000 greenbacks called demand 
notes, because they were full legal tender, were 
always at a premium above gold, and the rest of 
the greenbacks as soon as their disability was 
partially taken off by the order of the secretary to 
receive them in payment of duties, leaped from, I 
believe, ten per cent, discount to a small premium 
above gold where they have remained ever since, 
paying hundreds of millions of gold obligations 
at the urgent request of the holders. 

The fiat paper money of England from 1789 to 
1823 according to Mill did not depreciate during 
the twenty years of its existence. For six hundred 
years the money of the bank of Venice which was 
on the same principle did not depreciate, but went 
as high as thirty per cent, above gold in free com- 
petition with that metal, and during the whole 
time there w^ere no money panics. 

I have purposely given, mainly, English author- 
ities, and those the very highest, not because 
we have not plenty of others to the same 
effect, but because the would be economists who 



MEASURE OR STANDARD OF VALUE. 25 

hold contrary views get them mainly from English 
sources. 

There is no standard of value; and if there 
were, gold or silver cannot be permanent and 
therefore just measures or standards of value. 
John Sherman says, "There are times under any 
system of convertible currency when it is impos- 
sible to maintain actual coin convertibility." 

John A. Logan says, "During the war we were 
forced to abandon our metallic standard of value 
and adopt a paper one." 

The U. S. Supreme Court says in 12 Wallace 
Page 553, "It is said there can be no uniform 
standard of weights without weight, or of measure 
without length or space, and we are asked how 
there can be any uniform standard of value which 
has itself no value * * * It is hardly correct 
to speak of a standard of value." 

A standard that in times of greatest need breaks 
down, is evidently no standard. 

A paper, full legal tender currency, as we have 
seen by the authority of the highest names in 
political science and from experience, may be so 
guarded as not to fluctuate, and hence be a just 
and uniform standard so far as there is any 
standard; but a commodity currency must fluctu- 
ate, and hence be an unjust standard. 

The important thing in the currency of a coun- 
try, is that it be something the quantity of which 
is subject to the control of that country. If it 



26 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PEEYENTION. 

choose gold or any otlier commodity, if there were 
no otlier country that wanted the same, it would 
be easy to keep a uniform amount in circulation 
and it would be "honest money." 

When the material chosen is one for which all 
nations are striving, and one which is free to 
follow the law of its being which requires it to go 
where there is the greatest demand for it, and 
which, when confidence fails, is sure to be hoarded 
from its great commodity value, the country's 
currency of which it is the whole or part must be 
subject to frequent and violent fluctuations and 
that country's commerce and labor must be sub- 
ject to the ruin which such fluctuations always 
cause. 

Prices are fixed by the volume of currency. 
James Stuart says, "that money is nothing more 
than a scale of equal parts for the measurement 
of things vendible. * * * The unit of measure 
has no invariable proportion to any part of value." 
In "Walker's Science of Wealth," on the 191st 
page, is a table showing the average price of 
ten products in New York market, with the 
average volume of currency for twenty-six years 
(1834—1859.) 

If we keep in mind the fact that it usually takes 
some months after a change of volume of cur- 
rency for the resulting change in price to appear, 
we will see how perfectly, where some other cause 
does not counteract, the price follows the volume 



MEASUEE OR STANDAED OF VALUE. 27 

of currency. In 1836, when the amount of cur- 
rency was the highest, being $16.73 per capita 
mess pork was $22.50 per barrel. As the amount 
of currency sank, pork sank, till in 1843 when the 
currency was the lowest, being $6.18 per capita, it 
was $6.90 per barrel. The lowest price was reached 
the next year when the currency was $8.34 per 
capita, and pork was $6.28 per barrel. Molasses 
muscovado, were 39i cents in 1836 and m 1843 
they had faUen off to 21^ cents per gallon. Wool, 
common in 1836 was 43i cents, in 1843 20% cents, 
and thus on through the list. 

What was the effect of this on the producer y 
Evidently bankruptcy, especially if he had any 
debts which alone would not shrink with the loss 
of values in his products. Who gained by it j 
Evidently, then as always, the men whose wicked 
money schemes were the cause of all the rum. 

As a result of all the ruinous acts of Parliament 
requiring the resumption of specie payments after 
1820, the bank note circulation of England, ac- 
cording to Horn Tooke on prices as given m 
"Allison's Europe," shrunk from £48,278,070 m 
1818 to $26,588,600 in 1822. In the same time 
wheat sank from 80s. 8d. per quarter to 38s 
Ud Cotton from 2s. od. per pound to Is. Wool 
per pound, from 6s. 6d. to 3s. 6d. and aU other 
things, except debts and fixed salaries, m the same 
proportion. The suffering was terrible, and then, 
as always in such oases, the loss fell mainly upon 



28 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

tlie poor and sinned against part of the com- 
munity, tlie wliole amount of which, as Alison 
says, was not less than 1500,000,000. 

In view of such undoubted facts it is folly for 
anyone to assert that the volume of currency does 
not fix prices, and that violently shrinking prices 
do not bring ruin to the commercial and labor- 
ing classes. 

Of what avail is the protection of a tariff to the 
laboring man against the ruin of a contraction of 
the currency? 

Alison tells us that the great English manufac- 
turers favored the contraction of the currency in 
order to bring down the wages of the laborer. 

That prince of err or is ts in Political Economy, 
as in religion. Bob Ingersol, says truly that a gold 
currency is a refined system of barter. But bar- 
ter belongs to the savage state of society, and the 
people who should adopt it as their only means of 
effecting exchanges, would certainly land, if they 
did not begin, in that primitive condition. Only 
once, when the world's sovereignty hung in the 
balance between Eome and Carthage during the 
second Punic war, did Rome after the adoption of 
gold and silver as money, resort to an inconvertible 
paper currency and the result made her indis- 
putable mistress of the world. 

Her subsequent adherence to a specie currency, 
as is now well known to all except the worshipers 
of the golden calf, was the means of her finaj 
destruction. 



MEASURE OR STANDARD OF VALUE. 29 

Her $1,900,000,000 specie in tlie time of Augus- 
tus had shrunk to $400,000,000 in the times of the 
Antonines and the aureus which in the times of 
the Antonines weighed sixty-eight grains, in the 
fifth century weighed eighteen grains though it 
was only taken for debts and taxes at its original 
value. 

So prodigious a contraction of the currency 
without any diminution in the number of transac- 
tions or lessening of the amount of debts and 
taxes which were all measured in the old standard, 
destroyed agriculture and finally caused men, as 
Gibbon says, to disappear from the cities so that 
wild beasts came back into them; reduced the 
masses to the verge of starvation; cut down the 
standing army from 600,000 to 150,000 in the times 
of Justinian and brought on the destruction of 
the empire and the long night of the dark ages. 

It was not till God in his providence pushed 
out one man to set sail westward bearing the 
destinies of the race in his frail vessel, that this 
pall of darkness began to be lifted. In a few 
years the amount of specie in the Old World was 
quadrupled as Alison says, and a wonderful period 
of intellectual activity and material progress 
began. 

The needs for money were ever increasing with 
increasing population, and the constant discovery 
of new avenues of trade and lines of manufacture. 
In course of no very long time the yield of the 



30 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

mines began to decline, and the diminished 
amount of money where a constant increase was 
needed, began sorely to be felt, when providence 
again interfered to prevent a backset in the w^orld's 
progress; the mines of California were discovered 
and the relief that had begun to be sorely needed, 
came. 

"While the world's progress has come to require 
vastly more money in this railway and telegraphic 
age, the natural supply of gold and silver is again 
on the decline; meanwhile as in the case of loco- 
motion, the old stage coach has given way to the 
steam car, and the steam car is now beginning to 
yield to the electric motor, so the old cumberous 
system of barter, even in its refined form, is 
coming to be found too slow and unreliable for the 
highway of the world's commerce. The creditor 
class who have in the past reaped vastly more than 
their share of the world's harvest from the much 
too limited amount of money, are loth to lose their 
advantage, and have so arranged the paper that 
shall supplement or supplant the specie which has 
made them millionaires and money kings at the 
expense of labor, as that they can control its 
quality and amount in their own interest. 

The plan was suggested by our then enemies, 
British bankers in 1862, in the following clear and 
plain language : 

" Slavery is likely to be abolished by the war 
power, and chattel slavery be destroyed. This I 



MEASURE OK STANDARD OF VALUE. 31 

and my European friends are in favor of, for 
slavery is but the owning of labor, and carries 
with it the care for the laborer, while the 
European plan, led iuby England, is capital, con- 
trolling labor by controlling wages. This can be 
done by controlling the money. The great debt 
that capitalists will see to it is made out ot this 
war, must be used as the means to control the vol- 
ume of money. To accomplish this they (the 
bonds) must be used as the banking basis, it 
will not do to allow the 'greenback' as it is called, 
to circulate as money any length of time, for we 
cannot control them. We can control the bonds 
and through them the bank issue." (Hazzards 

Was ever a more diabolical conspiracy to enslave 
the poor devised among men or devils ! yet it has 
been carried out to the letter, with exactly the ter- 
rible results predicted. Eepublican laborer, look 
at this and then guess how much good you are 
likely to get from Mr. Blaine's protective policy. 
The great Eepublican party adopted this sugges- 
tion of British bankers to enable American bankers 
who are now a majority of Congress, to determine 
exactly how much you shall have for your labor, 
and to reduce you to the condition of a slave whose 
master should be under no obligation to feed him 
after he was worn out in his service. Do you lite 
the arrangement, and will you still vote tor the 
masters who are riveting the manacles to your 



32 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PKEVENTION. 

limbs ? You will if yon support either of the old 
parties, for this soulless money power rules them 
both. You have begun to experience in the 
greatly reduced price of your products and your 
wages, reduced more than half, and the corres- 
ponding increase of the burden of your debts and 
taxes, some of the beauties of this new arrange- 
ment; but your present burdens are not more than 
a feather compared to- what is in store for you 
when their scheme is fully completed. The silver 
"dollar of your daddies" is a slight obstacle in the 
way of gobbling up the small remnant of your 
possessions; and how can they rest in peace while 
a few of those hated "greenbacks " are stored away 
in their vaults as reserves, filling the place of the 
gold they might tuck away there to still more con- 
tract the currency and take still more ofP of your 
wages and the price of your products, and thus 
reduce you to a still more servile condition. Mark 
too what they say about the greenbacks which 
they say they cannot control, and which they 
admit stands in the way of their controlling you. 
It is always safe to learn wisdom from your enemies. 
What they want concerning you is precisely what 
you do not want if you are wise. Hear them. 
They are not fools enough to say that it is not 
money. They do say in effect that it is the free- 
man's money, while national bank bills, the 
swindle they have put in the place of it, they 
admit is the instrument of your enslavement. 
We intend to make the facts still more patent to 



MEASUEE OK STANDAKD OF VALUE. 33 

all wlien we come to treat of the National Banks. 
Mark further their declaration that "capitalists 
will see to it," that "a great debt is made out of 
this war." They don't say that a great debt need 
to be made out of the war, and the figures show 
that but for their handiwork the war was actually 
paid for at its close, and if they had not interfered 
to enrich themselves and enslave you, less than 
ten years would have wiped out the debt they had 
unjustly heaped up and the expectations of their 
British friends would have failed, and you would 
have been freed from the burden, which they pre- 
tend has been lightened, but which they mean to 
make heavier and never to suffer you to lay down 
until you die, and leave your posterity in slavery. 

A moment's reflection will convince any candid 
mind that in reality the national debt has, in effect, 
been increased, not lessened. 

At the close of the war there were no tramps, 
and few millionares; everybody was employed at 
more than double present wages. Manifestly, as 
all agree that the debt must be paid by the labor 
of the country, when the laborer got $2.00 per day 
and constant employment, it would take less than 
half as many days' labor to pay the debt than now 
when he gets one dollar, and even less, and 
employment only half of the time. It is not even 
pretended that the debt has lessened more than 
half. Certainly the labor of the country has not 
half the power to pay it that it had in 1865. 



CHAPTEE III. 

SPECIE BASE. 

Wlieii the foundations of Eome's power and 
greatness were being laid, her money was discs of 
bronze metal bearing the impress in relief of oxen 
and sheep, (hence our word pecuniary) her prin- 
cipal wealth, which they represented and had the 
legal power to transfer with other commodities. 

As her principal business was war and she had 
little foreign commerce, and exacted tribute from 
other nations that she conquered, the base of her 
currency never fell out, and from its nature could 
not be hoarded or sent to other nations to pay 
adverse balances of trade, hence she knew no 
money panics and her prosperity was umnteruj)ted. 
Not only was this fiat currency so based as to be 
secure, but its quantity was uniform and adequate 
to her needs, having been at one time two billions 
in amount. Besides this, like the Jewish land 
system, established by God himself, her lands were 
a common possession in which every citizen was 
entitled to a share. While this state of affairs con- 
tinued Boman freedom continued, and the subjects 
of such a government can always be depended upon 
to protect it and increase its power. It was an evil 

34 



SPECIE BASE. 35 

day for Borne when she adopted gold and silver as 
a commodity currency, which has ever been the 
means of making the few very rich and the masses 
poor. 

As the few became rich by cornering this com- 
modity money, they, as did the nobles of England 
in later times, seized upon the lands and dispos- 
sessed the rightful occupants buying up in some 
cases whole provinces. 

The result was the shameless luxury and attend- 
ant vice of which Horace, Juvenal, Tacitus and 
most of the Roman writers loudly complain. 

Although she had no Pall Mall Gazette to reveal 
the nameless vices of her wealthy nobles, her poets 
and historians have left us abundant evidence that 
they were fully the equals of their English, and if 
the facts were known their American successors in 
heartless vice and cruelty. 

The report of the "silver commission of the 42d 
Congress," page 49, graphically depicts the result 
of the shrinkage of this commodity currency. 
" Population dwindled, and commerce, arts, wealth 
and freedom all disappered, the people were re- 
duced by poverty and misery to the most degraded 
condition of serfdom and slavery. The disinteg- 
ration of society was almost complete. The con- 
ditions of society were so hard that individual 
selfishness was the only thing consistent with the 
instinct of self preservation. All public spirit, 
all generous emotions, all the noble aspirations of 



36 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

man sliriyeled and disappeared a-^ the volume of 
money shrunk and as prices fell ! 

History records no such, disastrous transition as 
from the Eoman Empire to the dark ages. 

Various explanations have been given of the en- 
tire breaking down of the framework of society, 
but it was certainly coincident wUh a shrinkage of 
the volume of money which was also without his- 
torical parallel. The crumbling of institutions 
kept even step and pace with the shrinkage in the 
stock of money and falling prices. All other 
attendant circumstances than these last, occurred 
in other historical periods unaccompanied and un- 
followed by any such mighty disasters." Not only 
this but the same results have always followed the 
same causes. Alison shows by Home Tooke's 
"Tables of Prices" that a shrinkage of one fourth in 
the volume of currency in 1825 in England was 
followed by a one half fall in prices, and distress 
which, it is painful even now to read of, the major- 
ity of real property holders losing their property. 
The shrinkage of our currency since 1865 to one 
quarter of its volume, as every one knows, has 
resulted in a similar fall of prices and like distress. 
Let the same process continue as that did for cen- 
turies, and only a few rich men of the creditor 
class would be left, and most of the few others still 
alive, would be wretched peasants and paupers 
sunk in superstition and vice. 

What a terrible comment is this upon the 



SPECIE BASE. 37 

Savior's words when he said, "Ye cannot serve 
God and mammon." With the shrinkage of money 
and men, Christianity and morality dwindled till 
its few real votaries were constrained to live in 
poverty and obscurity, while the priests of the 
g^^eat apostacy, to secure ascendency of the nomi- 
nal church of Christ, winked at the vices and pan- 
dered to and shared the dissolute pleasures of the 
corrupt nobility. Why cannot reformers see by 
this that the way to destroy Christianity and tem- 
perance, and every virtue in both classes, is to 
make one class of men very rich and another very 
poor, while the way to promote these is to secure, so 
far as possible, the equality of human conditions? 
When the life blood of commerce began to flow 
into the old world's veins in consequence of a vast 
influx of the precious metals from the new, and as 
a result men began to rouse themselves to a greater 
activity they found themselves bound hand and 
foot by kingcraft and priestcraft. Mind first cast 
off its fetters and in course of time began snapping 
the gyves that bound the body. When body and 
soul were measurably free, it was found that prop- 
erty too had its despot whose rule was more disas- 
trous than that of king or priest. In their blind- 
ness men have enthroned him by law and imagined 
their goods secure. Always when financial gales 
have arisen, if they were long continued his throne 
has toppled and like a coward he has fled the realm 
and left his poor subjects to the mercy of their 



38 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

enemies after being sorely depleted and ruined by 
the effort to hold up his sinking fortunes. When 
his stout-hearted but much abused subject, 
National Credit, has, so far as possible, repaired 
the loss and made it possible, foolish mortals 
again, mid great rejoicings, bring back and crown 
the renegade and traitor and say, now at length 
our fortunes are upon a secure foundation. 

So said they in England after his restoration in 
1823, and yet before three years had elapsed, half 
his subjects were stripped of their property and 
made laborers and paupers, while a few saw their 
coffers filled to overflowing. The same thing 
happened again several times before 1844, when 
the younger Sir Bobert Peel, as he boasted, by 
reorganizing the Bank of England rendered his 
throne secure, but scarce three years saw it again 
reeling and his poor foolish subjects suffering 
untold distress. Only the suspension of Peel's 
act and the issue of £8,000,000 of inconvertible 
paper averted its inglorious fall. But for the 
stupid law that prevented it, Alison says, this 
might have been done a few months before and 
saved the ruin of thousands. The same thing has 
been repeated in England every five to seven years 
since and in this country about as often. No 
commercial country now pretends to adopt a pure 
commodity currency as did Bome but at the sug- 
gestion of bankers, the only class who are bene- 
fitted by it they have adopted a still worse one. 



SPECIE BASE. 39 



It is well known that there is not enougn of the 
precious metals in existence to form the currency 
needed by two of the present great commercial 
nations and if there were enough they are two slow 
for the age of stream and electricity. 

The creditor class who have so long used a 
commodity currency to juggle with, do not want to 
see this so serviceable a tool slip entirely from 
their fingers, so they have made it, as they say, 
the base of the currency which is to be when they 
get it to suit them, convertible paper, which is in 
fact not money at all, as the high authorities I 
have quoted, including our own Supreme Court, 
affirm, only their promises to pay money, ^y a 
senseless jargon of gold standard, silver standard, 
single standard, double standard, monometalism 
and bimetalism they cheat the people into believ- 
ing that somehow, but how they never attempt to 
explain, this commodity base of a paper currency 
gives its value to the whole volume of ourrenoy 
and determines the value of all commodities. 
This senseless chatter which they sometimes 
dignify by calling it the battle of the standards, 
reminds me of a reputed trick of that Athenian 
statesman and demagog, Alcibiades, who when he 
was in power and was trifling with the liberties of 
the people, had a favorite dog whose chief adorn- 
ment was a very beautiful, curled caudal ap- 
pendage. To the astonishment of everybody, one 
morning he made his appearance shorn ot his 



40 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PEEVENTION. 

chief attraction. In respond o to inquires for an 
explanation, liis crafty master said, "I prefer that 
the Athenian people busy themselves about my 
dog's tail rather than my public acts." The fact 
is, as is confessed by Mr. Thompson the president 
of the Chase National Bank of New York, in a 
circular to the recent Banker's Congress in 
Chicago, "Gold as money is practically unknown 
by the people. * * * The idea of compelling 
the people to carry a metallic currency is abso- 
lutely exploded." 

The gold and silver of the country is mostly 
piled up in the Treasury and the vaults of the 
banks, and while so kept is no part of the active 
volume of the currency that fixes prices of com- 
modities and is of no more use than as though it 
were yet hidden in the earth. The very idea of 
promising to pay from three to ^yq dollars of 
paper obligations with one dollar of money in case 
of the currency itself, the volume of which fixes 
the price of commodities; and besides this promis- 
ing to pay on demand about three billions of bank 
deposits and all public and private indebtedness, 
which it is estimated now equals half the value of 
all the property in the nation, besides all the 
current money transactions of the nation with the 
comparatively trifling amount of specie that is sup- 
posed to constitute the base of the currency is one 
that ought to have originated, if it did not, in the 
brain of a madman. 



SPECIE BASE. 41 

Eemember tliat we saw from the highest 
authority and from experience that a full legal 
tender paper currency, Hugh McCuUoch to the 
contrary notwithstanding, is money and may be so 
limited as not to fluctuate; that a currency, in 
whole or in part a commodity, must fluctuate. 

Our vast amount of debt contracted when the 
volume of currency was three or four times as 
great as now, and therefore when the value of 
property was in many cases three or four times as 
great, must be paid when means of payment are 
only one-fourth as great as when they were 
contracted. 

It is plain, unless the volume of money, not 
promises to pay money, is vastly increased, the 
debts can never be paid and ought not to be. 
They have been virtually quadrupled in amount 
by varying the conditions of payment since their 
contraction, not by any process of nature, but by an 
intervention of law at the instance of the persons 
to whom they are due. 

In the light of the above facts Wendell Phillips' 
statement that England's specie base was fifty 
cents to one hundred dollars paper, and if you 
wanted the specie you could not get it, was far this 
side of the truth, and the state of our own currency 
is probably even worse. 

The man in the scripture who built his house 
upon the sand was counted a fool, how much wiser 
is a people who build their financial house upon 



4:2 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

the most shifting of all commodities, gold and 
silver ? If it were true that they were always the 
most stable in value of all commodities, which is 
shown not to be the case by Secretary Fessenden, 
in his report after the partial demonetization of 
the greenbacks by Congress, when gold went up 
one hundred and fifty per cent, in a few days and 
went down again as rapidly, while other com- 
modities showed no such variations in value, yet 
the fact that they must be taken out of a country's 
currency to pay its foreign balances of trade, or 
desert it to be hoarded or buried in case of loss of 
confidence, makes them entirely unfit for the foun- 
dation of a financial structure that can possibly 
stand. As well expsct a house to stand whose 
foundation stones were constantly rolling from 
under it. 

. Abundant facts have already been given to prove 
the statement true, and if more were needed they 
are at hand. 

Eemember, 1st. Their departure lessens the 
volume of currency and causes prices to fall. 

2d. Their return to a currency inflates it and 
causes prices to go up. 

3d. That fluctuation ruins producer and trader 
and benefits only bankers, and sometimes even 
they are involved in the common ruin. 

4th. That fluctuation no more pertains to a 
paper currency than a gold one, and need not per- 
tain to the former at all, but is inseparable from 
the latter. 



CHAPTEE lY. 

WHAT IS HONEST MONEY? 

John Stuart Mill says, "an inconvertible paper 
made legal tender is universally admitted to be 
money." The United States statutes say of the 
greenbacks: "These notes shall be legal tender 
and lawful money." Adam Smith says: "Notes, 
not legal tender and payable on demand, are not 
paper money, the circumstances of convertibility 
does not effect paper money." "It is an essential 
part of the idea of money that it shall be a legal 
tender."— Mill. 

Judge Tiffany on Constitutional Law says, 
"There is no such thing as gold or silver money 
or paper money. Money is the sovereign authority 
impressed on that which is capable of taking and 
retaining the impression. That upon which the 
stamp is placed is called coin, the coin may be 
metal, parchment or paper." The United States 
Supreme Court says of the Constitution: "Nor 
does it prescribe that the legal value shall corres- 
pond at all with the intrinsic value in the market." 

The North British Bevieiv insists that, "Metallic 
money while acting as coin is identical with 

43 



44 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PKEVENTION. 

paper money in respect to being destitute of in- 
trinsic value." 

Eicardo says of paper money, "Though it has 
no intrinsic value, yet by limiting its quantity, its 
value in exchange is as great as an equal quantity 
of coin." 

Prof. McCuUoch, the great Scotch political 
economist says, "Thus it appears that whatever 
may be the material of the money of a country, 
whether it consists of gold, silver, iron or paper, 
and however destitute of intrinsic value it may be, 
it is yet possible, by sufficiently limiting its quan- 
tity to raise its value in exchange to any conceivable 
extent.' 

Henry Cernushi, the great French economist 
says, "Money is a value created by law, its basis 
is legal and not material. It is perhaps not easy 
to convince anyone that the value of metallic money 
is created by law. It is however the fact. It 
makes no difference of what material money is 
composed, whether it is costly or otherwise,^ the 
law of legal tender gives value to money and that 
value increases or diminishes in proportion as the 
volume (quantity) is greater or less." 

Judge Tiffany v/ho is said to be authority on 
Constitutional Law in all the courts, says. Chapter 
12, Section (400): "The authority which coins or 
stamps itself upon the article can select what sub- 
stance it deems suitable to receive the stamp and 
pass it as money and it can affix what value it 



WHAT IS HONEST MONEY ? 45 

deems proper independent of intrinsic value. The 
value is in the stamp, not in the metal or material." 
Thus we see from the highest legal and scientific 
autho4:ities, that in theory at least, the only un- 
fluctuating and hence honest money is paper 
money. That gold itself is only fiat money. 

Now let us see if the facts correspond to the 
theory. Sir Archibald Alison in his "History of 
Europe" tells us that it was by inconvertible paper 
currency that the Eomans colJquered Carthage, 
that Napoleon after he had baffled the armies of 
Europe was conquered through the means of the 
same kind of money issued by England after every 
sovereign in gold had fled the currency of the 
realm. That through the sole means of such notes 
made legal tender in the twenty years between 
1797 and 1823, notwithstanding her Herculean war 
efforts, England doubled her property and enjoyed 
such prosperity as she has never known before nor 
since. This fiat money was legal tender and John 
Stuart Mill in his "Political Economy" says, "that 
in the twenty years it never depreciated at all and 
that gold only appreciated three to ^yq per cent. 

In France, during the Franco-German war, 
although $600,000,000 of inconvertible legal tender 
paper were issued through the bank of France, 
about as much as we issued during the rebellion, 
it all was kept at par with specie during the war 
and was only depreciated two and one-half per 
cent, during tiie pressure to get gold to pay off the 



46 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

great indemnity to Germany. The FrencL. govern- 
ment was not guilty of the crime of depreciating 
her own money as ours was, the bitter fi'uits of 
which villainy we have reaped and are now reap- 
ing in the payment of billions of debt, principal 
and interest. 

John Stuart Mill says, "in France, paper money 
actually means inconvertibility." Our Supreme 
Court has decided in accordance with all authori- 
ties and all experience, that legal tender Treasury 
notes (greenbacks) are money. 

Jefferson says, " Bank paper must be suppressed 
and the circulating medium must be restored to the 
nation to whom it belongs. " He further says of 
national paper based on taxes, which he recom- 
mends in their place "if obtained in perpetuum, 
it would be sufficient to always carry us through 
any war." 

It is urged against Treasury notes that they are 
only issued as a war measure. Nothing can be 
further from the truth. They were issued many 
times by the colonies, and made receivable for 
taxes, and have been issued since the formation of 
the national government probably five times, to 
relieve a money stringency caused by desertion of 
the metals during peace, to once during war, and 
whenever issued and not damaged by over issue, 
as in some of the colonies, or by act of Congress, 
as once only during the last war, they have been 
at or above par for specie. But they are uncon- 



WHAT IS HONEST MONEY ? 47 

stitutional. That question ouglit to be settled by 
the high authorities given, or certainly by the 
Supreme Court; but since there appear to be some 
persons not convinced,- chiefly those who have a 
money interest in not being so, and those whose 
eyes they fill with dust so that they cannot see, 
I will give two or three of the many facts that go 
to establish the constitutionality of the right to 
print money for the people. Our first reasons are 
historical. 

The colonies first and the states afterward did 
issue their notes as money, and one of the griev- 
ances of the colonists was that the mother country, 
jealous of their prosperity, which was phenomenal 
under this rational money system, sought to for- 
bid the colonies to use it. 

Before the formation of the Constitution, this 
right to issue their credit as money was the recog- 
nized right of the states. Under the Constitu- 
tion they ceded that right, not part but the whole 
of it, to the general government. So that if the 
states ever had that right, and such is the 
undoubted fact, the general government must have 
it. 

In the second place, if such power were not 
expressly stated, I believe it is generally conceded 
that any power absolutely necessary to the chief 
ends of government, which are the protection of 
the lives and property and liberty of the citizen, 
is implied in the Constitution. 



48 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PEEYENTION. 

Now a little attention to the authorities quoted 
and the facts of history will show that a specie or 
commodity currency, or one of paper professedly, 
( I use the term because there never was any such 
thing except where specie itself was demonetized, 
as a real specie base) based on specie, not only 
never has protected property, but as Wendell 
Phillips and Alison and hundreds of others who 
are competent to testify from their knowledge of 
the facts, say " the great lie of specie base has des- 
troyed the commercial prosperity " of the United 
States and England once every six or seven years 
since its inception. 

Alison says, "In every one of the great money 
crises which have occurred every five or six years 
during the past thirty years, from $500,000,000 to 
$750,000,000 have been destroyed. Is the retention 
of gold worth purchasing at such a price ? What 
is the use of it, if it can only be retained by making 
the capitalists richer and all other classes poorer? 
* * * And it may safely be affirmed that if the 
requisite change is not made, the nation will con- 
tinue to be visited every four or five years by a 
periodical calamity which will destroy all the fruits 
of former prosperity." 

If then it is the duty of government to protect 
the property of its citizens, necessarily its powers 
are commensurate with its obligations. The same 
high authorities that testify that a specie or specie 
base currency must fluctuate and cause the ruin 



WHAT IS HONEST MONEY ? 49 

described, say, that inconvertibio paper may be so 
limited as not to fluctuate and hence not to destroy 
but to protect property yalues. 

To the same purport is the fact attested by Mill, 
that it did not fluctuate when tried for twenty 
years, while it furnished England the means to 
destroy Napoleon. Further and still more con- 
vincing testimony is found in the application of 
the same principle in the inscribed credits of the 
bank of Venice, established in 1171, and destroyed 
only with the Republic in 1797 by Napoleon, which 
credits most of the time for over 600 years, were 
twenty per cent above gold, and so perfectly did 
they protect property that the country did not 
experience a destructive panic during the whole 
time. The same principle has been tried with 
uniformly the same re^lt in the banks of Barcel- 
ona, Genoa, Amsterdam and Hamburg, for hun- 
dreds of years. 

Besides all this, the men who raise the consti- 
tutional objection don't believe in it themselves, 
and don't expect or want the country to practice 
it. The English courts define it thus : " Money 
comes from monendo, stamp; as wax is not a seal 
without a stamp, so metal is not money without 
the impression of the sovereign authority." 

Our highest authority on commercial law says: 
" The value is in the stamp, not in the metal or 
material." Now the government is constantly 

4 



50 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PEEVENTION. 

stamping for the banks not for the people, what 
passes for money, and although, I believe, but two 
metals are mentioned in the Constitution, govern- 
ment has coined or printed or stamped, for the 
terms are synonymous in all Europe, five other 
metals as money more or less perfect. Now the 
men who raise the constitutional objection, don't 
object to any of these. May we not fairly infer 
that their evident money interest and not any 
regard for the Constitution, is the ground for their 
objections. 

Our Supreme Court expressly says: *'The 
power to issue Treasury notes is not a war power 
to be exercised in times of war only. But of the 
occasions when and the times how long it shall 
be exercised and in force, it is for the legislative 
department of the government to judge." It fur- 
ther says : " Another ground of power to issue 
Treasury notes or bills is the necessity of providing 
a proper currency for the country." Plato says 
"Money is a creation of law to eJBPect exchanges;" 
so says every respectable authority and the usage 
of every government since. In conclusion then 
remember: 

1st. Gold and silver are not honest money, and 
from their nature cannot be, unless their place 
when they run away is filled by inconvertible value. 

2d. National bank bills are not money at all, 
and of course not honest money, and yet they are 



WHAT IS HONEST MONEY ? 51 

what the men who cry honest money propose to 
and do give the people. 

3d. The Treasury Note or Greenback is honest 
money, and that is the very reason why British 
bankers in " Hazzard's Circular," issued in 1862, 
say that it must not be allowed to circulate, and 
why our bankers, although it is their specie reserve 
are seeking to destroy it. It does not rob labor 
by a double interest, and when confidence fails, 
fail to meet its engagements to pay honest debts. 



CHAPTEE y. 

OUE NATIONAL BANKS. 

Following the policy that was suggested by the 
British bankers of which the elder Sir Bobert 
Peel said to his son when he had settled it upon 
his country, "you haye doubled my property but 
you haye ruined your country," which in half a 
century lessened the number of English land 
holders from 220,000 to 30,000, in 1865 when prices 
were made by ayolume of currency, (if we include 
the south, ) some 40 dollars per capita, which was 
not too much for a prosperous country and should 
haye been increased with increase of population 
rather than lessened, 'we entered upon the most 
ruinous contraction of the currency known to 
history. 

The process of funding upon which England's 
most sagacious statesman, Pitt, said "if the Ameri- 
cans entered they would find their boasted liberties 
a failure," began in earnest and the people were 
forced by a series of acts of Congress that were in 
the nature of ex post facto laws characterized by 
the utmost disregard of the rights and interests of 
a long suffering and distressed people, to giye up 
what in the language of the laws was lawful 

52 



OUE NATIONAL BANKS. 53 

money, and to receive in its place what is not 
money at all. I purpose to describe hereafter this 
legislation in the interest of money changers and 
against the people, designed, professedly to bring 
back the fiction of specie payments and furnish 
the base of a system of so called National Banks. 

The law creating these banks w^as passed in 
1862. It provided that the bonds of the nation 
might be deposited by private corporations of not 
less than five persons, with the comptroller of the 
currency, which corporation should receive the 
interest the same as other holders of bonds, and 
besides as a gratuity, except one per cent on their 
circulation, ninety per cent, of the face of the 
bonds, in bank bills to loan to the people for what 
they could get. This amounts to a sheer donation 
of this amount for the time, to men already rich. 
Hon. Geo. F. Talbot, himself a hard money man, 
says in a letter to the Portland Argus: "The 
interest unnecessarily paid by the government, 
ultimately by the tax payers, upon the bonds that 
might have been substituted by non interest hear- 
ing notes, without inflating the currency, and with- 
out our progress toward a specie basis being any 
slower or more difficult, has been more than 
120,000,000 per annum since 1865." 

That is in addition to the billions of property 
destroyed by shrinking the currency from $40 to 
$12 per capita, the people have paid, without 
receiving any equivalent at all, over $400,000,000 



54 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

for the privilege of using their own credit as 
money. 

Shameful as this showing is, it is the least 
objectionable feature of the whole scheme to 
swindle and enslave the wealth producers of the 
country. 

The law provides that these banks may increase 
their issues to any extent they please up to ninety 
per cent, of all the national bonds out, and when 
they have by inflation caused people to embark in 
new enterprises and involve themselves in debt to 
get them homes, or for other purposes, they may 
suddenly draw in their issues and compel payment 
when prices are reduced by contraction to half 
what they were when the debts were contracted. 
Three years ago, when the extension of their 
charter was under discussion in Congress, they 
threatened if the bill providing for funding at 
three per cent, passed, to withdraw $200,000,000 of 
their issues, and create the worst panic the country 
ever saw. Thus did they justify the words of 
warning of the country's ablest statesmen. 

Jefferson says: "Bank paper must be sup- 
pressed, and the circulating medium must be 
restored to the nation to whom it belongs." 

James Madison says: "It may be necessary to 
ascertain the terms upon which the notes of the 
government shall be issued upon motives of gen- 
eral policy as a common medium." 

Jackson says: "But if they (Congress) have 



OUE NATIONAL BANKS. 55 

other power to regulate the currency, it was con- 
ferred to be exercised by themselves, and not to be 
transferred to a corporation." 

John C. Calhoun says of a goyernment currency: 
" Why shall it not be considered safe in its own 
hands, while it shall be considered safe in the 
hands of eight hundred private institutions scat- 
tered all over the country, and which have no other 
object than their own private profit ? " 

Thomas H. Benton says: "The goyernment 
itself ceases to be independent, it ceases to be safe 
when the national currency is at the will of a 
company. " 

In his report to Congress in 1789 Hamilton 
insists that the general government has the right 
to furnish a national paper currency to take the 
place of coin. 

Henry Clay said of a national bank whose whole 
capital was only $15,000,000: "May not the time 
arrive when the concentration of so vast a portion 
of the circulating medium of the country in the 
hands of any corporation will be dangerous to the 
liberties of our country?" The capital of our 
monster system is $500,000,000. 

The great expounder of the constitution, Daniel 
Webster said: " The whole control over the stan- 
dard of value and medium of payments is vested 
in the general government." 

People who remember the times before the war 
have a lively recollection of the miseries of a mixed 



56 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND, ITS PREVENTION. 

currency. It was supposed to liave from a fifth to 
a third of the sum in real money, called for by the 
face of its bills, in the bank to redeem them. It 
oftener had none, and the sum borrowed for the 
occasion of the visit of the bank examiner, was 
promptly returned, that it might do like service 
for other banks. When the present banks shall 
have destroyed the remnant of the greenbacks, 
their paper will be like the issues of the old state 
banks in respect to being a mixed currency. Then 
all there is between the present and the old system, 
the security of which was state and private stocks, 
is a ten per cent, tax on the issues of the old system, 
levied to protect the present system against the 
former one, which the banks wish repealed. Under 
this system prices are fixed by a currency, the base of 
which must go to pay foreign balances, and with 
the disappearance of every dollar of such -base, 
from three to five dollars of paper must be retired 
if the system keeps its balance. It needs no argu- 
ment to show that such a system must be subject 
to violent and extreme fluctuations, and must pro- 
duce just what we have seen that it always has 
produced, great losses and wide spread ruin of all 
except the creditor class. 

Then it is part of the currency that fixes prices, 
or of the measure of values, and its effect on val- 
ues is similar to what would be the effect if yard 
sticks and pound weights were one day an inch too 
long or an ounce too heavy, and the next were 



OUR NATIONAL BANKS. 57 

deficient twice that amount. It is not possible 
that such a currency will not work great injustice. 

Then nothing ought to be permitted to help fix 
prices that will not in every possible case pay 
them. Nothing can under all circumstances pay 
money values but legal money. These bank bills 
are legal money from the banks to the government, 
but not from the government to the banks, nor 
between individuals. The banks have it in their 
power at any time to bankrupt the Treasury of the 
nation, and in emergencies that may come, ruin 
individuals. 

Our fathers objected to the former National 
banks because they used their resources to influ- 
ence elections. In both the former banks, I believe, 
the government held directorships, and so had 
some check on this evil tendency, besides the num- 
ber of bank officers and stock holders was so small 
that their power was hardly worth naming beside 
the present system. 

Under the present system we have a majority of 
Congress that are bank officers or stock holders, 
or their attorneys, who shamelessly vote to enrich 
themselves and impoverish their constituents. 
Three years ago when the extension of their char- 
ters was to come before Congress for action, two 
men who had been most active for the people 
against the blood suckers, were told that they 
should be defeated for re-election if it took two 
million dollars, and the campaign managers of both 



58 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PEEVENTION. 

the old parties, which are owned and run by the 
banks, said they had more money tendered them 
than they needed or could use. 

The very idea of basing one kind of money upon 
another, is an utter absurdity. As compared with 
"greenbacks" or Treasury notes, the action of the 
government itself shows that the latter are by far 
the best. 

The government gives no security either for its 
bonds or Treasury notes, but it requires the banks 
to give security, and makes their issues redeemable 
in Treasury notes. They are in reality the specie 
base of the bank bills, yet Henry Ward Beecher 
calls them a rotten currency. If they are rotten, 
what must be true of the currency of which they 
are the base ? The security of the greenback is 
the same as that of the bond which is the security 
of the bank bill. 

The banks in what are called redemption cities 
are required to keep on hand a reserve of twenty- 
five per cent., and the other banks fifteen per cent, 
against their circulation and deposits. The Eastern 
banks are also allowed in the slack season of the 
year, to keep the surplus funds of the Western 
banks when not needed to forward the crops, and 
to pay interest on them. Of course they must loan 
them to be able to do so. 

In 1873 when their funds were needed by the 
Western and Southern banks, they were loaned to 
Wall street stock, bond and gold gamblers, to 



OTJE NATIONAL BANKS. 59 



enable them to prey upon the public credit, and 
the fall of Jay Cook and others had begun to de- 
stroy public confidence so that the Eastern banks 
could not get funds temporarily loaned to the gam- 
blers and could not return their money to the 
Western banks whose customers were driven to the 
waUfor want of funds to carry on their business 
and meet their obligations, general and disastrous 
panic was the result. These banks, whose claquers 
for want of logical argument, say the greenback is 
unconstitutional, a "rotten currency", "rag baby 
and apply to it other epithets in the nature of 
logical fallacies, now in a time of perfect peace, 
for dear life, begged the Secretary of the Treasury 
to issue to them more of this "rotten currency 
and he did issue to them $29,000,000 which, as did 
the issue of £8,000,000 of similar money in 
England in 1825, stopped the panic and saved the 
ungrateful banks from destruction and the country 
from still greater ruin and distress, thus confirm- 
ing the declaration of Jefferson many times before 
proved true in our own and England's history that 
a nation's credit is its only resource m times ot 
war and financial distress. Eemember, then, m 

conclusion: . . .i, • i, 

1st. This system robs the poor to give to the ncn. 

2d. It corrupts our politics. 

3d. It is a menace to the prosperity and liberty 

of the country. 



60 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PEEVENTION. 

^th. It necessarily is a fluctiiating and hence 
dishonest measure of value. 

5th. Not being legal tender it is, as money, a 
cheat and a swindle. 



CHAPTEE VI. 

HOW PANICS ABE OB MAY BE MADE. 
Bad as is England's money system, onrs is much 
worse. Beyond £16,000,000 whioli the Bank of 
England may issue on the national credit, it can 
issue no bills unless they be issued on gold depos- 
ited by individuals and kept in the bank, so that 
the bank cannot, as ours can, at its pleasure, inflate 
the currency to any amount it pleases.. 

When the president and directors of the isanU 
of England were called before the Bullion Com- 
mittee to testify as to the effect of the bank's rais- 
ins the rate of interest and knocking ofE discounts 
to prevent an outward flow of gold, they admitted 
that the result was the ruin of the commercial and 
laboring classes that was charged, but said they 
considered it necessary. The world may well ask 
for information they did not volunteer to give 
necessary for what? Surely not for the good of 
the poor people who were rendered paupers by it 
without any fault of their own or any means ot 
avoiding the ruin thus brought upon them. 

It is said that when the Bank of England wishes 
to get in some of its paper that is in the hands ot 
the people, it gets some one to start the rumor that 



62 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

there is a money stringency just ahead. Of course 
the rumor causes the stringency, which if not 
arrested ripens into panic. 

Our panic machine is not so clumsy an affair as 
that. When it desires to draw in a haul it begins 
silently, as the newspapers say, to strengthen its 
reserve. Now the good people, innocent of any 
knowledge of what a reserve is, suppose it must be 
a good thing to strengthen almost anything and 
are delighted with the announcement. 

The law creating the national banks requires 
them to keep in their vaults, in the Eastern cities 
twenty-five per cent, and in the rest of the country 
fifteen per cent, of their deposits, in "lawful 
money," the only money that will, under all cir- 
cumstances pay debts. Of course this large part 
of the debt paying currency is so situated that it 
can pay only the debts of the banks, and is no part 
of the actual medium of exchange. 

When they wish to make a squeeze nearly three 
thousand national banks begin adding to this idle 
money, and of course contracting the volume of 
the currency that fixes prices and pays debts. 
Many more private banks of one kind or another 
follow their example. Here as always, "the wise 
man forseeth the evil and hideth himself, but the 
simple pass on and are punished." Every sharp 
visaged Shylock in the country, who tries to keep 
his money in easy reach, understands what that all 
means and begins drawing in his loans and piling 



now PANICS ARE OR MAY BE MADE. 63 

up his money to keep it secure till lie can use it to 
buy property at one-fourth its value, a time not 
far ahead. 

Reserves are strengthened all round and there is 
little money left to pay debts or sustain prices, or 
pay laborers. 

The poor man who has been struggling to secure 
a shelter for his loved ones that he may call his 
own, and has perhaps paid all but the last payment, 
sees that terrible attachment, a mortgage, wrest it 
from his grasp and turn his family shelterless into 
the street. 

The astute editor to whose lying sheet he has 
pinned his political faith, bustles about and per- 
haps goes to Europe, as did the editor of the 
Chicago Tribune after the panic of 1873, and turns 
over every stump or stone to see if he can find the 
hole out of which the panic crept. The poor man 
is dazed and don't quite understand it, but hopes 
that with so faithful a watch dog to guard his 
interests he shall at least be safe in future. Reso- 
lutely he sets himself at the heavy task of finding 
something to do to keep starvation from a door no 
longer his own, and votes on for his party blindly 
as before. 

If our editor had asked Mr. H. W. Cannon the 
Comptroller of the currency, without going to 
Europe, he might have learned that the panic of 
1873 was caused, as we have elsewhere stated, by 
the Eastern banks loaning the reserves of the 



64 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PKEVENTION. 

Western banks, allowed by law to be left in their 
keeping on interest, to Wall street gamblers. If 
he is in doubt about the cause of the panic of 
1884, without the expense of a trip to Europe he 
can find out from the same public officer in his 
report for 1884, that the panic of that year had 
the same origin. 

I think that the treacherous demonetization 
of silver was in part the cause of the panic of 
1873. By the way, this Comptroller of the cur- 
rency is a benevolent man, I suppose all public 
officers are, especially those connected with the 
U. S. Treasury. He has great sympathy for the 
poor banks. Last year according to his report 
those in Chicago only cleared, above all expenses, 
nine per cent, on their capital. True, the farmers 
and other wealth producers did not probably clear 
two per cent, on their capital, but then they are 
rich and can stand it, or at any rate, they, although 
the majority of voters in the country, yet have no 
votes in Congress and hence have no rights that 
anybody is bound to respect. This tender hearted 
public officer pities the poor banks and advises 
Congress to relieve their distress by giving them 
the one per cent, on their circulation, the only tax 
they now pay to the nation, and donate them 
instead of ninety per cent, of their capital as now, 
one hundred per cent, in bills to loan for all they 
can get. As the majority of Congressmen are 
bankers, or concerned in banks, they will probably 



HOW PANICS AKE OE MAY BE MADE. 65 

relieve the distress of this kind ofiS.cial by grant- 
ing his request. 

According to the report of the Secretary of the 
Treasury for 1884, there was somewhere in the 

country in gold and silver $814,000,010 

In silver certificates 131,556,530 

Gold certificates 117,000,000 

Fractional currency, probably mostly 

lost, old demand notes, &c 16,000,000 

National Bank notes 333,559,813 

Treasury notes 346,681,016 

Total currency $1,758,797,360 

The amount in the Treasury was $523,896,110.10 
The reserves in 2664 National banks.. $346,100,000 

Suppose that the reserve of private banks which 
are more numerous and have more than $346,100,000 
double the deposits of the national banks and 
private hoards together amount to the same sum, 
probably a small estimate. Total amount of re- 
serves, $1,216,096,110.10. 

Amount of money in circulation to pay debts 
and taxes, and to sustain prices, $542,901,250.10. 

Considering the greatness of our territory and 
that we are over 50,000,000 of people, this is cer- 
tainly a very small amount for our active currency. 

On the 27th of October, 1883, in the city of 
New York, the ratio of reserves, to circulation and 
deposits in the national banks, was 24.5 per cent., 
to deposits only, 29.9 per cent., a little more than 

6 



66 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PEEVENTION. 

the legal requirement. On the 11th of October, 
1884, a panic year, the ratio on circulation and 
deposits had increased to 35.2 per cent., and on 
circulation only, to 86.9 per cent. 

Now recall the statement and figures of Alison, 
where he shows that a one-fourth reduction of the 
English currency in 1825 was followed by a one- 
half reduction in prices, and suppose even a small 
portion of the small amount of active currency 
cornered as in the case of the amounts loaned to 
Wall street gamblers and you certainly have first- 
class conditions of a panic. 

The figures are not at hand, but if they were, 
in addition to former hoards, the sums piled up in 
bank vaults and the national Treasury during the 
year of 1885, together with lessened amount of 
currency, withdrawals of national bank issues and 
other causes, they would furnish us unmistakable 
cause for the continued and increased hard times. 
If our masters, the banks, through their actuary, 
the Secretary of the Treasury, don't let up pretty 
soon they will perpetrate the folly of killing the 
hen that lays for them the golden eggs. 

Let us for a moment turn from this painful 
picture to another presented to us by the director 
of the mint in his report of 1884 

France, a country, not so large as one of our 
states, and that needs, certainly less money than 
we, has 1848,000,000 in gold, and $590,900,000 in 
silver, $568,727,468.85 in legal tender notes of the 



HOW PAN-ICS ARE OR MAY BE MADE. 67 

bank of France. Of this vast sum there was in 
the bank of France, $378,877,948.35. She has 
then in circulation, so far as this record shows, 
$1,628,349,520.50, all legal tender except $57,900,- 
000 in silver, which is partial legal tender. 

If her population numbers 35,000,000, she has 
in circulation for every one of them, over $46.50, 
which is at least four times as much as we have, 
and is more, probably, than we had, if we include 
the South, when the ruinous and terrible contrac- 
tion began in 1865. 

The immediate cause of panics is various, but a 
sharp contraction of the currency is always a 
good preparation for them. Sometimes they have 
been preceded by speculation, and sometimes 
not, but always the speculation has been caused 
by convertible paper money in times of pro- 
fessed specie payments, and never by incon- 
vertible paper or Treasury notes. 

It would seem that the folly of attempting to 
provide currency, partly of paper that is not 
money, professedly based on gold and silver, or 
either one of them, made money by law, had been 
tried in England and this country and failed 
often enough to show that it is a senseless en- 
deavor. When one thinks of the ruin and misery 
that it has caused, he is tempted to think that 
Carlyle was not far wrong when he said there were 
30,000,000 Englishmen, mostly fools, and that the 
50,000,000 Americans are their near relations. 



68 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PBEVENTION. 

History shows tliat while a people are possessed 
with the lunacy of specie base, they will not, 
because they dare not, provide themselves suffi- 
cient currency to make their masses prosperous. 

If, at the close of the war, when every hand 
was employed and every heart happy, gold and 
silver that had been for years unseen by the 
masses of our people, could have been sunk in the 
ocean's depths, and the pernicious ideas connected 
with them entirely effaced from the minds of men, 
there is no reason in the nature of things why 
that happy condition might not have continued 
till the present, and f orever*^ 

When the people of a country are all employed 
and have the means of buying what they want, 
there will be little occasion to look for a foreign 
market, but if there should be even great occasion, 
if it occupies a vast area like ours, there will 
always be enough peculiar products and special 
manufactures which will be needed by other 
nations to settle foreign balances. 

In spite of all the bluster about the danger of 
exchanges having to be made in eighty-five cent 
dollars, foreign exchanges are made according to 
the standard of the nation to whom we sell and 
balances are paid in commodities valued by the 
same standard. The peculiar effort of govern- 
ment is now to be sure to have the means to pay 
foreign balances, even if in doing so we ruin 
our own masses and destroy our industries so that 



HOW PANICS AEE OR MAY BE MADE. 69 

we shall have no means of trading at home or 
abroad. Remember in conclusion: 

1st. That a contraction of the currency in 
actual circulation is a preparation for panic. 

2d. That the proportionate shrinkage in the 
currency is much less than the shrinkage in 
property values. 

3d. That a currency that is not in every part of 
it * 'lawful money" may greatly add to the general 
ruin and ought never to be tolerated. 



CHAPTEE yil. 

HOW PANICS ARE MENDED. 

If any one still doubts tlie destructive character 
of a specie or specie base currency, I will, before 
entering upon the discussion of the subject in hand, 
give a few more facts and authorities on this sub- 
ject. A specie base system, in spite of a protective 
tariff, puts down prices and wages to compete with 
the pauper labor of other countries. We must pro- 
duce enough cheap products to send abroad, to pay 
for all that we buy abroad including vast importa- 
tions of luxuries for our fast increasing army of 
monied aristocrats or our gold and silver the base 
of our currency must go to pay balances and with 
every dollar sent abroad from $3 to $5 in paper 
must be retired to preserve the balance of the 
system. 

Such a system enables a few money dealers at 
any time by combining to corner its base, to, in 
effect, double the burden of all debts and taxes 
and fixed salaries, and take half from the valuation 
of all kinds of commodities while at the same 
time doubling the value of money, the species of 
property in which they deal. If our money obli- 
gations be held abroad, as now, which should never 

70 



HOW PANICS ARE MENDED. 71 

be allowed, it enables foreign and perhaps hostile 
nations, at their pleasure to wreck our industries 
and ruin our people by drawing out the base of 
our currency. This was done in 1857 when Eng- 
land sold $7,000,000 worth of our securities in 
New York and thus caused the panic and suspen- 
sion of specie payments of that year. 

The Iowa State Register, February, 1875, says: 
"The only argument there is in favor of specie 
base is that some stock jobber may hold the cards 
in his hand when he wishes to get the property of 
the country at half price." 

The Supreme Court of Iowa, in volume 16 of 
its reports, says of gold, "Gamblers may specu- 
late in (corner) it, at the risk of sacrificing the 
financial if not the dearer interests and the life of 
the nation itself." 

The United States Monetary Commission said: 
"Money is the vitalizing influence of industry, the 
very fiber of social organization, the protoplasm 
of civilization and as essential to its existence as 
oxygen is to animal life." 

If these be words of truth and soberness, and I 
expect to show before I am through that they are, 
the wretch that can deliberately tamper with this 
vital breath of mankind ought to be hung higher 
than Haman, as he may be a thousand murderers 
in one. 

Leaving out of the account these artificial, but 
intensely real dangers of such system, the natural 



72 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PRETENTION. 

and necessary ones are truly appalling. If men 
continue to multiply and replenish the earth ac- 
cording to the Creator's command, and do not con- 
tinue to kill one another off by wars as the 
Romans did, the money of the world must increase 
with population and new uses for the same. The 
vast indebtedness, public and private, now roughly 
estimated at $125,000,000,000, would, under this 
system, soon be doubled in the amount of labor 
it requires to pay it, as the amount of the precious 
metals used in the arts is probably on the increase, 
and loss by wear is not less than one per cent., 
and, when in actual circulation, not less than four 
or five per cent, and the world's product from its 
mines is again on the decrease. Double the uses 
of money without increasing its amount and you 
inevitably double its purchasing power and take 
at least half from the value of everything else 
except debts, fixed stipends and taxes 

A specie base system is a robber system, and in 
its very nature cannot be anything else. A system 
based on gold alone is doubly a robber system. 
The only true and safe system will demonetize 
both and let them be, while other nations fancy 
them as a currency, as they are now the commodi- 
ties with which foreign balances are paid. In the 
present state of affairs, the nation that should do 
so first would have very great advantage over other 
nations. The loss from depreciation of those 
metals would not be great, and would be very soon 



HOW PANICS AEE MENDED. 73 

made good by exemption from the great loss caused 
by tlie ever recurring panics, a single one of wMcli 
probably destroys more value tlian all the gold and 
silver in the country, and produces besides an 
incalculable amount of misery, pauperism, mtem^ 
perance, irreligion and crime. 

We have already given what history proves to be 
a permanent cure for panics, a currency that can 
be issued sufficient in amount per capita, and kept 
uniform in quantity. We have shown by history 
and by reason and by authority, that a specie base 
currency never has been and never can be kept 
uniform in quantity, hence always has produced 
and always will produce panics. 

The standard of value, so far as there is one is 
the whole volume of currency, and not the gold or 
silver in the currency or in the country. The 
Supreme Court says, "But value is an ideal thing. 
* * * The coinage acts fix its unit as a dollar; but 
the gold or silver thing we call a dollar is in no 
sense a standard of a dollar. It is a representative 
of it." 

If the country yet has too much reverence for 
the metals that have so often brought ruin to the 
masses to demonetize them, let it so far at least as 
the paper part of its currency is concerned, cease 
the folly of attempting to base it on specie and 
allow it to be issued as gold and silver are, only 
by the goverment and all of it be full legal tender. 

There can be no more propriety in a corporation 
issuing paper money than gold and silver. 



74: NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PEEVENTION. 

Let the government determine how much money 
per capita is needed to make the people prosper- 
ous, including in this sum the amount allowed to 
be kept in banks as a reserve against their 
deposits. By constitutional amendment ^x this as 
the amount of the country's money. Make it the 
imperative duty of some high official, if the banks 
begin to increase their reserves to order govern- 
ment disbursing officers to loan like amounts 
directly to the people on real estate security at a 
low rate of interest, so as barely to cover cost of 
issue and other expenses. 

If it be true that the country can not transact its 
business without banks, they should not be banks 
of issue and should on no account be allowed to vary 
the volume of currency in actual circulation. It is 
to the interest of banks not of the country, to keep 
the volume of currency low or at least to make it 
low occasionally. If an attempt to decrease it on 
their part was sure to increase the amount in the 
country and they were prevented from increasing 
the amount in circulation by lessening their 
reserves, the paper money in circulation might be 
kept nearly free from fluctuation. To counteract 
the fluctuation of gold and silver — if they must 
still be kept as money, their place when, and as 
fast as they leave the country, or are hoarded, 
should be filled by inconvertible legal tender paper 
which should be retired as fast as they come back. 
This may be a matter of great difficulty and even 



HOW PANICS AKE MENDED. 75 

impossible to be carried out witb accuracy and yet 
fcbere is little doubt that in some such way panics' 
can be avoided and the ruin and loss even of one, 
would pay for much trouble • and considerable 

expense. 

We will now show from history that inconver- 
tible paper when freely issued in time of panics 
has stopped them and is the only thing that has 
ever done so. 

In Walker's "Science of Wealth," on page 239 we 
find this : "The banks may not only escape damage 
but may even profit very much by a pressure, if it 
does not come to be a panic; for it greatly en- 
hances the rate of interest." 

"Practically mixed currency banks expand as 
often and as much as possible and when the 
reaction comes, hold on to specie payments and a 
high rate of interest until the bankruptcy of their 
debtors begins to be so alarming as to endanger 
their own securities. They then suspend, allow 
their debtors to pay up in the notes they cannot 
redeem in specie and thus settle the indebtedness 
of themselves and the public." 

It is the plentiful issue of their notes that have 
ceased to hold out the lying promise to pay specie, 
that finally, after wide spread ruin and the robbery 
of a, high rate of interest puts a stop to the money 
pressure, or the panic. Evidently the issue of 
this paper in advance of the stringency or the 
panic would have prevented the same, but the 



76 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PKEYENTION. 

banks would liave failed of their golden harvest at 
the expense of the laboring and commercial classes. 
Such gains are no better than robbery. 

We see by Home Tooke's tables, as quoted by 
Alison, that the bank notes in circulation in Eng- 
land on the 28th of Feb. 1825, were X20,753,760 
and the bullion in the Bank of England was 
£8,778,100. On Dec. 3d of the same year, on a 
pretence of preparation to return to specie pay- 
ments, the notes in circulation had contracted to 
X17,477,290, and the bullion in the bank had 
shrunk to .£2,167,000. During this terrible con- 
traction between December, 1824 and June, 1826, 
cotton fell from 16 and 18|d., to 6 J and 74d. 
Silk fell from 18s. and 29s. lOd. to 13s. 3d and 16s. 
Sugar from 41s. 5d. to 28s. 9d. Iron per ton, from 
£11 and £12 fell to £8 and £9, and other things in 
proportion. 

"The bankers, on the verge of insolvency them- 
selves, sternly refused accommodation even to their 
most approved customers; persons worth £100,000 
could not command £100 to save themselves from 
ruin. *We were,' said Mr. Huskisson, 'within 
twenty-four hours of barter.'' " 

"The danger was got over, not by any increase 
in the metallic treasure of the country hut by a 
great issue of paper where there was no specie to 
sustain if' 

At this time the Bank of England had only 
£1,000,000 in specie to pay £25,000,000 in notes. 



HOW PANICS AEE MENDED. 77 

The fearful distress and ruin and tlie consequent 
emigration of hundreds of thousands of England's 
robbed and plundered citizens, and the pauperism 
of thousands more, might all have been prevented, 
as Alison says, by the issue of X8,000,000 of incon- 
vertible paper, that finally stopped the panic, a 
few months before it was issued. 

What greatly agravated the trouble and added 
greatly to the ruin that followed, was the fact that 
it was the £1 and £2 notes that were retired. Far 
the larger amount of the money transactions of a 
country is in small sums. Our own hard times 
are without doubt partly attributable to the fact 
that our Secretary of the Treasury, in direct viola- 
tion of the letter of the law, which was worded on 
purpose so as to prevent just what he is doing, is 
retiring one and two dollar greenbacks. The law 
that caused the distress in England, did not apply 
to Ireland and Scotland. Scotland had for over 
one hundred years enjoyed just what the hireling 
press of this country are trying to scare us with, 
the prospect of a pure paper legal tender currency, 
and had known but one trifling failure within the 
memory of man. 

It became apparent that Parliament intended to 
apply the same law retiring small notes to Scotland. 
The calamity was averted by monster meetings of 
her citizens, and great petitions that were stirred 
up by a series of articles by Sir Walter Scott, 
published in a country newspaper. Scotland was 



78 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PEEVENTION. 

allowed to keep her small notes, and witli tliem her 
prosperity almost nninteruptedly down to the pres- 
ent, notwithstanding her proximity to panic cursed 
England. 

The above facts are taken from Alison, from 
whom we take the following: 

"Thus the ruinous effects of a contraction of the 
circulating medium, even when most violent, may 
be entirely prevented, and the industry, revenue 
and prosperity of a country completely sustained 
during the utmost scarcity, or even the entire ab- 
sence, of the precious metals. It was thus that 
the alarming crisis of 1797, which threatened to 
induce a national bankruptcy, was surmounted 
with ease, by the simple device of declaring the 
Bank of England notes, like the Treasury bonds 
in the second Punic war, a legal tender, not con- 
vertible into cash till the close of the war, and that 
the year 1810, when, from the demand for gold on 
the continent, there was not a guinea left in this 
country, was one of general prosperity and the 
greatest national efforts recorded in its annals." 

As it was with England for over twenty years 
previous to 1825, our own country has never known 
greater prosperity, notwithstanding her Herculean 
war efforts, than she did for seven years previous 
to 1868, when the effects of contraction began se- 
riously to be felt. And that, too, in spite of the 
fact that greenbacks, our only money that was in 
use among the people, were partially demonetized 



HOW PANICS ARE MENDED. 79 

at the instance of gold gamblers. Then in conclu- 
sion remember: 

1st. Inconyertible paper, so far as known, is the 
only remedy for panics. 

2d. That history shows that Jefferson was right 
when he said that a nation's credit was its only re- 
source in money crises, however brought on, and if 
" had in perpetuum,'' and used within the limits of 
its need for a currency, would carry it through any 
emergency. 



CHAPTEE yill. 

PAPER MONEY. 

Lord Liverpool, the cliancellor of the English 
Exchequer, Mr. Huskisson and Mr. Channing, 
while, advocating the destruction of the £1 and 
£2 notes, admit that "people all prefer notes to 
coin; for what reason it is difficult to say, but the 
fact undoubtedly is so." Our first issue of 
$60,000,000 in Demand Notes that were full legal 
tender, were worth a small premium above gold, 
when owing to the partial demonetization of the 
greenbacks, at the dictation of gold gamblers, one 
dollar in gold was worth $2.85 in greenbacks. A 
perfect paper dollar was worth to pay duties and 
interest on our debts, $2.85 in imperfect ones. 
Ever since the order from the ^tscretary of the 
Treasury to receive greenbacks for duties, they 
have been worth a little more than gold, and have 
at the urgent request of their holders, paid hun- 
dreds of millions of gold obligations. 

It has taken the most desperate and long con- 
tinued efforts of the banker class, through their 
humble servants, the American Congress, to get 
even part of the Treasury Notes out of the hands 
of the people. After they could speculate in it no 

80 



PAPER MONEY. 81 

longer, Wall street gamblers did not want gold 
and it rapidly accumulated in the treasury. As 
convincing proof that the people don't want it; the 
U. S. Treasurer tells us that 160,000,000 in gold 
have been deposited in the treasury, for which the 
owners have taken, not gold certificates nor gold 
coin, but silver certificates, when silver in which 
they were payable, was, as bullion, worth twenty 
per cent, less than gold. Recently when the Treas- 
urer wanted to exchange silver for gold, the banks 
said yes, and chose, not standard silver dollars, but 
subsidiary coins that were worth less than standard 
silver. 

The English statesmen quoted previously go on 
to say: "Great sacrifices had already been made to 
effect the introduction of even a partial metallic 
currency in the country, and these sacrifices had 
been made in vain. A large supply of gold had 
been obtained at a great expense, and it was got 
only that we might see it depart, and be compelled 
to purchase it again at a double expense." 

Well may Alison, from whose work the above 
extracts are taken, ask, what is the use of retain- 
ing gold at such fearful cost ? 

England's greatest living statesman, Gladstone, 
seems to have more rational views on the subject 
of money. He says: " I imagine there can be no 
doubt among us that the great conditions of a 
good currency are its safety, convenience, cheap- 
ness, and I must say, for my part, 1 should give a 



82 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PKEVENTION. 

fourth condition to a perfect currency, which is that 
the profit of that currency ought to be the profit of 
the nation." None of these conditions apply per- 
fectly either to a specie, or specie base currency. 
All of them as we have shown apply perfectly to a 
properly limited, inconvertible paper currency. 
Take the latter condition for example, every sum 
lost, of a specie currency, is a double loss of the 
full amount. One loss is to the individual who 
happens to be the loser, and the other is to the 
nation, which loss may be entirely irreparable. 
Such losses are considerable, and in course of time 
would materially contract our currency and lessen 
prices. Losses of an inconvertible paper cur- 
rency may be to the country no loss, but even a 
gain to their full amount, and can only be a loss 
of the trifling sum required to replace them. 

If the people do not want specie, neither do the 
banks themselves want it, especially silver. The 
New York Clearing House set itself against the 
authority of the nation by refusing to receive in 
settlement of balances what Congress, which 
according to the decision of the Supreme Court, 
has full authority to say what shall pay debts, had 
made full legal tender, i. e., standard silver dollars. 
By this action they, so far as their immense trans- 
actions were concerned, contracted the currency to 
the extent of the silver that but for this action 
would have been put in circulation. 

We are not advised as to the reasons for this 



PA.PEE MONEY. 83 

rebellions action, but it is fair to suppose that it 
was because of the great labor and considerable 
expense and risk that it would involve. It could 
not have been the twaddle about eighty cent dol- 
lars, because they did receive two kinds of dollars 
that had in themselves not one commodity cent, 
and only one had behind it as the silver dollar had, 
the legal tender law that according to the Supreme 
Court and all authorities, and the common usage 
of all governments, makes money. 

Congress fittingly forbade the National Banks to 
be connected with a clearing house that nullified 
its enactments. The clearing house then modified 
its action in form, but the Secretary of the Treas- 
ury has in fact, for it was presumably the intent 
of the law of Congress to force clearing houses as 
well as other debtors, to receive silver dollars, con- 
tinued the nullification by failing to offer silver in 
payment of clearing house balances, and has piled 
up the silver in the treasury while continuing to 
pay interest on a similar amount of indebtedness. 
It seems to me, one great need of these times is 
officers who will act for the people who pay their 
salaries, and not for the bank ring of which they 
are members. But how does this same honorable 
Secretary treat the people in the matter of the sil- 
ver dollar. In his estimation, what is too trouble- 
some and expensive money for the banks is good 
enough for the people. If he defies the spirit of 
a law to protect the bankers, he defies the letter 



84: NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

and spirit of another to force the people to load 
themselves down with this same expensive, incon- 
venient and dangerous money that is not good 
enough for the bankers. 

In the very teeth of the law he retires the one 
and two dollar greenbacks, for which he admits 
the people are begging, to force them to take silver. 

How long will a free people suffer themselves to- 
be served in this way before they will demand that 
such officials be dismissed from public positions. 

It is doubtless true as in the case of the retire- 
ment of the £1 and £2 notes in England, that the 
retiring of the one and two dollar greenbacks has 
helped still further to contract the currency and 
cause the continued and increased hard times. 

While the Secretary's illegal acts stop here, in 
his recommendations to Congress he goes still fur- 
ther, and advises the retirement of the five dollar 
greenbacks, a measure doubtless acceptable to 
bankers, as it is less expensive to them to reckon 
by tens than by fives, but that must inevitably add 
greatly to the inconvenience and expense of the 
commercial and producing classes. 

In conclusion, remember that nobody except 
bankers want specie. 

1st. Because of inconvenience in handling it. 

2d. Because of expense and danger in hand- 
ling it. 

3d. Commodity money belongs to the era of 
the stage coach and tallow candles. 



CHAPTEE IX. 

LEGISLATION AGAINST THE POOE. 

It is with feelings of sorrow, Inimiliation and in- 
dignation that I approach the subject in hand. If 
my language shall appear unduly severe, please 
consider it confirmation of the truth of the Scrip- 
ture that declares: " Surely oppression maketh a 
wise man mad." When I consider the dire and 
terrible effects of the human selfishness that it is 
now my duty to unmask, I feel that I cannot pray 
as did David: " Gather not my soul with sinners, 
nor my life with bloody men, in whose hands is mis- 
chief, and their right hand is full of bribes," un- 
less, like Israel's weeping prophet, I cry out in the 
name of the Lord, " Execute judgment in the morn- 
ing, and deliver him that is spoiled out of the hand 
of the oppressor lest my fury go out like fire, and 
burn that none can quench it, because of the evils 
of your doings." I am aware that such is the blind- 
ing nature of ignorance and sin that the Saviour's 
pleading accents in behalf of his murderers may 
be urged* in the case of the offenders in question, 
but these pleas availed not to save those ancient 
sinners from the condign and awful punishments 

85 



86 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PKEVENTION. 

that had been foretold, nor has God's " fiery indig- 
nation" against injustice, though it seemed to slum- 
ber long, ever failed to overtake the oppressor. 

Our fathers, after a terrible seven years strug- 
gle, made good their right to a separate and free 
existence. 

The colonies, unable to secure gold and silver for 
a currency, had issued Treasury notes, legal tender 
for all dues to the government. Franklin, the 
greatest philosopher and financier this country ev- 
er produced, in his defense of this money against 
the attacks of the English Board of Trade, says: 
" It gave new life to business, promoted greatly the 
settlement of new lands (by lending small sums to 
beginners on easy interest to be paid in install- 
ments), whereby the province has so greatly in- 
creased in inhabitants that the export from thence 
thither is now more than tenfold what it then was." 
He goes on in his complaint against England, and 
says the balance of trade took all the gold and sil- 
ver back to the mother country as fast as it came, 
and it seemed hard, therefore, " to refuse them the 
privilege of using paper instead." 

After the separation the states issued Treasury 
notes, and were very prosperous. Subsequent to 
the adoption of the present constitution a contest 
arose between the banker class, who wanted the 
people to pay them tribute in the shape of inter- 
est, and the representatives of the laboring masses, 
who wanted money based on the government's right 



LEGISLATION AGAINST THE POOK. 87 

to tax all commodities, which should be legal ten- 
der for government dues, and which had always 
done them such good service, and as far as the 
record goes, had never produced a panic. 

The portion of the patriots who were still im- 
bued with English notions of finance, aided by the 
tories or royalists who had now come to take part 
in public affairs, overcame the party that had out- 
grown their English prejudices, and thus, where 
republicanism in the matter of form of govern- 
ment prevailed, despotism in the matter of money 
received its first, would that it had been its last, 
triumph. 

Every lover of republican equality ought to join, 
in accordance with the advice of Eranklin and Ri- 
cardo, with Wendell Phillips, in urging that the 
question ot the currency be taken into the hands 
of the government, and that we " never rest till the 
money representing the wealth of the nation ( and 
not of its metals) is legal tender everywhere and 
for all debts, thus freeing us from all rings and 
corners in gold. This second Declaration of In- 
dependence will make our first a reality, and not a 
sham." 

In 1791 the first National Bank was chartered. 
The Secretary of the Treasury said that $10,000,- 
000 in coin could not be collected in the country. 
The bank had a capital of 110,000,000, and was 
permitted to issue $30,000,000 of notes, which 
were legal tender for all government dues, which 



88 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

made them better than coin; succeeding this bank 
which was not re-chartered, a large number of 
state banks s]3rang up. 

Against these banks Mr. Jefferson, then in pri- 
vate life, vigorously protested, urging that Treasury 
notes be made the money of the country. What 
sort of Jeffersonian Democrats are those who now 
favor our National Banks ? The state banks sus- 
pended in 1814, and it took two laws of Congress 
to force the people to exchange the Treasury notes, 
then issued for specie, in order that the National 
Bank chartered in 1816 might enjoy the monopoly 
of issuing the paper money for which it had paid 
$1,500,000 for twenty years. 

The reports show that these National banks had 
not more than one dollar in coin to twenty dollars 
in notes. What made their issues as good or bet- 
ter than gold was the fact that they were legal ten- 
der for all dues to the nation. Previous to 1836, 
when the second National bank's charter expired, 
Jackson had notified Congress that he could not 
approve of its re-charter. Instead of the issues of 
this private corporation he urged upon Congress 
the duty of exercising their constitutional right to 
supply the people with paper money based upon 
the " credit and revenues of the nation," not upon 
specie, which is always a pretense and a fraud. 
This is just what Franklin, Jefferson and Madison 
wanted when they demanded that Treasury notes 
should be " bottomed upon taxes." 



LEGISLATION AGAINST THE POOE. 89 

In 1836 Congress made certain state b^nks pub- 
lic depositories, and their notes legal tender for all 
government dues. A few months afterward these 
banks all suspended owing the government 
140,000,000, for which they had nothing to 
pay but their worthless paper, 

$100,000,000 in Treasury notes issued between 
1837 and 1848 carried the country safely through 
the suspension and the Mexican war. These notes 
were worth six per cent, more than specie in Mex- 
ico, making a uniform currency, where to have car- 
ried coin would have cost one and one-half to 
two per cent., besides the added risk, just 
as bondholders now ask to be paid in the 
greenbacks they are seeking to destroy so 
Whig and Wall Street Democratic members of 
Congress, although they bitterly opposed these 
notes, preferred them in payment of their salaries 
to bank notes, whether they promised coin or not. 

In 1846 a law was passed making gold, silver 
and Treasury notes equally a legal tender for all 
government dues. The repeal of this beneficent 
law at the dictation of bankers and Wall street 
stock and gold gamblers, in 1861, is the Pandora's 
box out of which was poured our national debt and 
countless miseries to our poor and oppressed labor- 
ing class and the country at large. 

By the disastrous panic of 1857, caused, as we 
have shown, by our securities being owned in En- 
gland, our government suffered comparatively lit- 



90 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PEEVENTION. 

tie because by the law of 1846 bank notes had been 
excluded from the Treasury. 

This fact, and numberless others of the same 
kind, prove that Calhoun was right when he con- 
tended that money received for all debts due the 
United States can never be at a discuunt for coin. 

In the war of 1812 the state banks undertook to 
supply the money needed by the government, giv- 
ing seventy-five or eighty dollars of their 
issue for $100 in bonds at six per cent. 
On these extortionate and disgraceful terms 
the first demands for money were met, the 
banks pretending to pay specie. Through the 
exertions of Mr. Jefferson, Treasury notes were is- 
sued, most of them bearing interest. Unfortun- 
ately for the country, their denominations were too 
large to permit of their general use as money, so 
the law allowed them to be sold to the banks which 
drew interest on them, and issued their own notes 
to the government. 

The banks soon suspended the pretense of specie 
payments, and the treasuiy of the country was 
soon filled with comparatively worthless suspended 
bank paper, while the banks were fiUedwith Treas- 
ury notes that were as good as coin. 

Patriotic citizens were giving their lives for their 
country's cause, while unpatriotic bankers were 
making vast sums out of their country's distress. 

In the great rebellion, at first, as we have seen, 



LEGISLATION AGAINST THE POOR. 91 

gold, silver and Treasury notes were all equally in 
the treasury, the law of 1846 being still in force. 

Up to this time all Treasury notes that had been 
issued in every time of the country's need had 
been legal tender for all government dues, and had 
been always as valuable as, and usually, from their 
greater convenience, a per cent, above coin. 

In its great need the country again went to the 
banks for money and was offered, as in 1812, $80 in 
suspended paper for $100 in bonds at 6 per cent. 
Hundreds of thousands of the country's best and 
noblest young men were freely imperiling their 
lives that their country might live, realizing, as 
Sophocles says, that she it is that saves us, and 
sailing on her right side up we are prosperous and 
happy, but, if she upsets, our lives and fortunes 
are swallowed up together by the merciless bil- 
lows. 

But the Shylock class were not willing to risk 
their money without the hope of vastly increased 
gains. 

Their offer was declined, but, as we shall see, 
they did not forego the opportunity to coin their 
ill-gotten gains out of their country's life blood 
and the half -paid toil ot generations unborn. 

The $60,000,000 of demand notes were issued, 
which at first not being legal tender, these patriots 
made war upon and sought to depreciate by not re- 
ceiving them into their banks. In self defense 
Congress made them full legal tender, and by im- 



92 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

posing a tax of ten per cent, drove tlie state bank 
issues out of existence, to make room for a national 
currency. With the prospect that some time, in 
spite of their efforts to prevent it, the national 
bonds will be paid, the national banks would now 
like to have this law repealed so that they can con- 
tinue their existence, basing their issues on state 
and private stocks. If the people are capable of 
learning anything from history, they will never 
suffer the repetition of that wickedness. 

In 1862, the Committee of Ways and Means, 
through its Chairman, that incorruptible patriot, 
old Thad. Stevens, reported a bill to provide money 
for carrying on the war. This was to be legal ten- 
der Treasury notes, such as the country had always 
issued, with this exception that, whereas, former 
issues had been by law, only legal tender for all 
government dues, these were full legal tender for 
all dues public and private. That is, in the lan- 
guage of our Supreme Court, and of all authori- 
ties, ancient and modern — Money. 

This bill quickly passed the lower house. Con- 
gratulations, such as have rarely if ever greeted 
the passage of any act of that body, poured in up- 
on Congress. Wall Street, however, was stirred at 
the propect of losing its chance to gamble in gold 
at the country's cost. As Mr. Stevens said, the 
" caverns of the bullion brokers and the saloons of 
the associated banks" were stirred. 

Judge Martin, from whose great work on the 



LEGISLATION AGAINST THE POOE. 93 

" Money of the Nations" many of the facts in this 
and former articles are taken, says : " The Money 
Power of Wall street was transferred to Washing- 
ton. The same powers that defeated the plans of 
Jefferson and Madison in 1816; those of Jackson 
in 1829, and 1830, 1831, 1832, and in 1833; and the 
measures of Tyler in 1841, 1842 and 1843, now mar- 
shaled their forces again to defeat the great meas- 
ures for the preservation of the Union. They 
found many faithful devotees in both houses of 
Congress. These men expressed holy horror at the 
idea of having the government issue money, when 
the government had done so at different times from 
1812 to 1857 ; of making paper money legal tender 
when the notes of the two banks of the United 
States had been legal tender for all debts due the 
government for forty years; when every Treasury 
note that had ever been issued by the government 
had been legal tender for all debts due the govern- 
ment i and when the law of 1846, then in force, 
made gold, silver and Treasury notes legal tender 
for all debts due the nation." 

That aristocratic body that has proved to be the 
grave of many measures calculated to benefit the 
people, now proved incapable of resisting the golden 
arguments presented by Wall street's deputa- 
tion that now came down upon it 100 strong. The 
Senate amended the bill by inserting the words, 
" except duties on imports." In the contest that 
ensued Thad. Stevens said: 



94 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

"I have a melancholy foreboding that we are 
about to consummate a cunningly devised scheme, 
which will carry great injury and great loss to all 
classes of people throughout the Union, except 
one. With my colleagues, I believe that no act of 
legislation of this government was ever hailed with 
as much delight throughout the whole length and 
breadth of this Union by every class of people, 
without any exception, as the bill which we passed 
and sent to the Senate. Instead of being a benef- 
icent and invigorating measure, it is now positively 
mischievious. It now creates money and by its 
very terms declares it a depreciated currency. It 
makes two classes of money— one for the banks 
and brokers and another for the people." Seeing 
by the clear insight of the true statesman the mis- 
eries involved, and which we are now suffering and 
must, unless better counsel prevails, leave to our 
posterity, it is said the old patriot cried when he 
finally saw the villainy accomplished. 

Senator Wilson, of Massachusetts, said: "I ven- 
ture to express the opinion that ninety-nine out of 
every hundred of the loyal people of the United 
States are for the legal tender clause." * * * 

The entire business community, with scarcely a 
single exception — men who have trusted out in the 
country in commercial transaction their tens and 
hundreds of millions are for the bill with the legal 
tender clause. -* * * 



LEGISLATION AGAINST THE POOE. 95 

In my judgment if you strike out the legal ten- 
der clause you will haye every curbstone broker in 
the country, the bulls and bears of the stock ex- 
change, and all that cla^s of men who fatten on 
'public calamity, and the wants and necessities of 
the people using all their influence to depreciate 
the credit of the government and break down the 
value of the demand notes. * * * I look upon 
the contest as one between the curbstone brokers, 
the Jew brokers, the money changers and the 
men who speculate in stocks and bonds, and 
the productive toiling men of the country." 

After a severe contest in which many in both 
houses acquitted themselves nobly, as usual the 
money changers prevailed. 

About that time many Congressmen known to 
be poor became suddenly rich. 

Demosthenes says he would not dare to tell the 
amount of money that rich men of his time of- 
fered him to induce him not to have a law enacted 
and put in force, compelling them to bear their just 
proportion of the public burdens. They even 
threatened his life in case he persisted in enforc- 
ing justice. He said that traitors of his time who 
sold out the interest of the people of Athens knew 
that ruin would come in consequence of their trea- 
son, but hoped that in some way during the gen- 
eral destruction, they and their possessions would 
escape. The great orator warned them that in the 



96 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

allotments of providence retributive justice gen- 
erally overtakes traitors first. Such lias been the 
experience of some of the men who betrayed their 
constituents in this case. 



CHAPTEE X. 

REPUDIATION. 

The men who hold the bonds of the United 
States, the principal part of the present value of 
which was secured by means almost infinitely 
worse than ordinary theft, as the result of the in- 
famous act just described and subsequent legisla- 
tion secured by similar means, have a very great 
horror of repudiation. I wish to make the charge 
deliberately, and propose to prove it, that through 
their supple tools the Congress and Executive 
officers of the goverment, these men are the 
repudiators, and, in corruptly repudiating their 
just obligations to the people, they have destroyed 
thousands of millions of value of other people's 
property, and are before God to-day responsible for 
the loss of thousands of human lives of men who 
have died by suicide because of their losses and 
for much of the intemperance, poverty, crime and 
misery that now make every thoughful patriot 
tremble for his country. If the government were 
to-day to refuse to pay every dollar of the bonds, 
it would have paid them, principal and interest for 
every dollar of its obligations now held by them, 
and yet they have the cheek to ask that theii' 

97 'i 



98 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PEEVENTION. 

obligations, bought witli greenbacks which by the 
infamous legislation, secured as we have seen by 
their efforts and money, were worth only forty or 
fifty cents on the dollar in that metal, be paid in 
gold. This would enhance the value of those 
obligations that are now worth twenty-four to forty 
or fifty per cent, premium, and considering the in- 
creased purchasing power of gold since their issue, 
makes the present indebtedness worth double the 
whole debt at first, or four times the value of the 
same amount of debt at the time they were first 
issued. 

The next act in this drama of which Jno. Sherman 
was the father, to carry out, and complete which 
was the purpose of the whole, was the passage of 
an act in 1863 providing for a system of misnamed 
National Banks, of which the only thing national 
is the name and the fact that the nation's credit is 
behind their issues which are furnished by the 
government, the banks paying the expense of 
printing them; and that the government makes an 
outright donation, except one per cent, of ninety 
per cent of their capital, while they continue; all 
the benefits of which go to private corporations. 
The people were now asked to give up what was 
issued to them as money, having power to pay all 
debts except interest on bonds which then were not 
in existence, and duties, and on which they paid no 
interest, and receive in its place that which would 
cost them six per cent interest and which as money 



REPUDIATION. 99 

was a fraud, not having the power to pay their 
debts at all. The Treasury note had and has to 
this day, this endorsement on its back: "This note 
shall be receivable at its face value for all debts, 
public and private, except interest on the public 
debt and customs dues." 

Naturally the people understood too well their 
real interests to be willing to make the exchange. 

To carry out the plans suggested by British 
bankers, the country must sell bonds for this 
money, and as the people who had this " lawful 
money" as it was styled in the law creating the 
National banks, did not want to invest it in bonds 
and pay six per cent, interest on it, they must be 
forced by law to do so. 

Secretary Chase testifies to the fact that the 
people wanted the greenbacks for money, and 
although he had sold $10,000,000 in bonds it was 
found next to impossible to get the greenbacks to 
pay for them. Remember the assurance on their 
back that the greenbacks were receivable at their 
face value foi all debts, and the same as gold and 
silver coin in payment for interest bearing obliga- 
tions of the nation. This was the contract with 
the people on which they had taken them. While 
they still held them, and Congress was bound by 
this contract to the people, Wall street induced 
Congress to pass the law of March, 1863, which 
provides that legal tender Treasury notes, in spite 
of the exDress contract on their backs, shall not be 



100 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

receivable for bonds after July, 1863, four montlis 
thereafter. 

A more infernal act of repudiation probably 
does not disgrace the statute books of any nation 
under Heaven. By this act and the speeches made 
at its passage, the people were made to think that 
unless they speedily exchanged their Treasury 
notes for bonds, they would be repudiated and 
they would lose them altogether. This act, the 
baseness of which, language fails to describe, 
caused the Treasury notes which, despite their 
being crippled by the exception clause, up to this 
time had not fallen below two and one-half per 
cent, for gold, as compared with gold, now rapidly 
to fall in value. Secretary Fessenden says in his 
report for 1864: "In the course of a few days the 
price of this article (coin) rose from $1.50 to $2.85 
in paper for $1 in specie and subsequently fell in 
as short a period to $1.87, and then again rose as 
rapidly to $2.50; and all without any assignable 
cause traceable to an increase or decrease of paper 
money. It is quite apparent that the solution of 
the problem may be found in the unpatriotic 
and criminal efforts of speculators and probably 
of secret enemies to raise the price of coin regard- 
less of the injury inflicted upon the country, or 
desiring to inflict." 

By this one act of repudiation it would not be 
difficult to show that the laboring people, in add- 
ition to the loss in other ways that cannot be esti- 



BEPUDIATION. 101 

mated, lost more actual money value than all the 
bonds of the government now in existence, but 
repudiation on the part of bondholders and bank- 
ers did not stop here, it only just began. 

This monster repudiation act of 1863 provided 
for the issue of 1900,000,000 in six per cent, bonds 
and to tax the old state bank issues two per cent., 
to force them to reorganize as National banks. 
That cunning schemer for the banks, John Sher- 
man, for fear the people even yet would not be 
induced or frightened into giving up the Treasury 
notes, now seeks to take them with guile. This 
law provides that $400,000,000 of the $900,000,000 
may be three years six per cent, notes legal tender 
in full. This schemer hoped that the fact that 
they were bearing interest and otherwise full 
money which the others were not, would induce 
the people to give up the original notes. The 
$500,000,000 would furnish bonds enough for the 
base of the National Banks and the $400,000,000 
three year notes would retire the greenback so as 
to make room for the bank notes. "The best laid 
plans of mice and men gang oft aglee." The con- 
spirators against the people's interest, the capi- 
talists, bankers and their attorneys, were surprised 
to find that the people still understood their 
interests and held on to the Treasury notes. To 
meet an emergency $150,000,000 more had to be 
issued in Treasury notes to redeem the three year 



102 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

notes, but they were to be used for no other 
governmental purpose. 

The section of this act that demonetizes green- 
backs as far as they relate to bonds, is so obscurely 
drawn that the common people would not under- 
stand that the design was, contrary to express con- 
tract, to prevent the Treasury notes from being 
received for bonds the same as coin, and that 
hungry Shylocks would readily understand the 
same. 

Similar chicanery was resorted to when, at the 
instigation, and by the money of Biidsh bond- 
holders silver was stealthily demonetized. 

We cannot follow all the tortuous windings of 
the monetary legislation of Congress of this period, 
but it all, with slight exceptions, had a single aiir , 
to force the people to give up the Treasury note 
that did not force them to pay tribute to bankers, 
and accept the bank note that did. 

The act of March. 1863, which we shall call 
repudiation number one, was passed to damage 
the legal tender notes so that bankers might buy 
bonds with them at forty to fifty cents on the 
dollar for the coin which they held. 

When this fell purpose had been so far accom- 
plished as to furnish bonds enough so that John 
Sherman's new banking swindle might get under 
way, in 1865, the soldiers were to be paid off and 
they would have nothing but greenbacks. A law 
was accordingly passed repealing the clause in the 



BEPUDIATION. 103 

law of 1863, forbidding the Secretary to receive 
legal tender notes for bonds. 

The design of this was not to benefit legal tender 
notes but to reduce their amount. McCuUoch was 
Secretary, whose plan was to destroy all the 
Treasury notes, following out the policy of John 
Sherman as signified in his great speech in favor 
of National Banks and against legal tender notes. 
McCuUoch stigmatized these notes which Congress, 
that had the sole power to say what should be 
money, had provided and which the people wanted, 
as "disreputable, dishonest money." Let him take 
care lest when the people come to understand the 
truth, these epithets stick closer to him than the 
shirt of Nessus and be more destructive to his 
reputation than that was to the body of its victim. 

The same hand that in 1863 secured the law of 
1863 which provided 150,000,000 fractional cur- 
rency, the most convenient money the country 
ever had, and which cost nothing but the cost of 
making it, in 1875 secured another law substituting 
in its place $50,000,000 in fractional silver at an 
annual cost of $2,500,000 interest paid to bankers. 
The people did not ask for this law, did not want 
it. James Yick says that the first year of its 
operation cost him $10,000 in loss to his business. 
During the twelve years in which it circulated, 
one-third of this fractional paper was lost by the 
various accidents to which money is subject. 
Suppose now that the silver that takes its place 



104 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PEEVENTION. 

meets with similar losses, or loses $15,000,000 in 
twelve years. This added to the annual interest 
makes $3,750,000 to which add the loss by abrasion, 
to which the paper was not at all subject, which is 
probably for fractional currency not less than five 
per cent, or in all, the yearly cost is $6,500,000. 
Put this amount and the vast annual loss in 
business and money spent for express or post- 
office orders, that was before saved by sending 
fractional currency, along side of the trivial ex- 
pense of the far more convenient paper, and you 
get some idea of the burdens these money kings 
are imposing, even in a matter that is relatively 
small, upon a patient and long suffering people. 

The climax of robbery and repudiation in the 
legislation of Congress was reached in the act of 
March, 1869, the first to receive the signature of 
Gen. Grant, than whose administration one more 
beset with thieves great and small the country has, 
happily, never seen. The terrible civil war had 
ended several years before. The soldiers had been 
paid off and money was coming into the Treasury 
much faster than the bonds matured so that they 
could be paid, so that there was no need to 
strengthen the credit of the nation and to do so 
while the exception clause in the greenback law 
remained, was to enrich bondholders and im- 
poverish the people. This infamous act and the 
one that I call an act of repudiation in my last, are 
not laws unless legislative acts in the nature of ex 



EEPUDIATION. 105 

post f ado enactments impairing the validity of 
contracts can be laws. 

The objectionable provisions of this act are: 

1st. That the Treasury notes should be paid in 
coin. 

2d. That interest bearing obligations should be 
paid in coin or its equivalent, except in cases 
where they are expressly payable in currency. 

By the law authorizing them, the Treasury notes 
were not payable in coin, nor were they intended 
to be. They were redeemable just as gold and 
silver were in all debts due the government (with 
the one wicked exception in the law creating them ) 
and in interest bearing obligations of the United 
States, the same as gold and silver coin, and in 
all money transactions between private individ- 
uals. There was no more propriety in providing 
to redeem them in any other way than there was 
in providing to redeem gold in some other way. 
The very idea of redeeming one kind of money in 
another is inconsistent with the idea of money, 
and while it continues to influence men, will pre- 
vent a permanent and settled money system, which 
is a matter of the very utmost importance to a 
commercial people. 

What better provisions for redemption are 
needed in a country where every, year something 
like 11,000,000,000 of taxes have to be paid, and 
principal and interest of probably $20,000,000,000 
of indebtedness in addition to all public and pri- 



106 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PRETENTION. 

vate transactions. Every time these convenient 
dollars pass from one person to another they are 
redeemed in all the way money ever needs to be 
redeemed. 

As for security, the advocates of specie, which 
now means only professedly convertible paper, for 
the people, that is not money at all to pay their 
debts, except taxes, have nothing to say, for the 
Treasury note which does not add heavily to their 
taxes, has the same security as the bank bill that 
does. 

The Treasury notes are styled "lawful money 
of the United States" in the laws creating them 
and in all the laws relating to National banks. 
They are the specie base of the National banks, 
being the security for their circulation and 
deposits. If they are not money, and require to 
be redeemed in some other money, we must con- 
clude that Congress was cheating the people when 
it made the bank bill redeemable in them. How 
ridiculous to call that "lawful money" that is not 
money at all if it needs to be redeemed in other 
money ! The fact is, this was another wicked and 
malicious stab at the credit of the Treasury note, 
and as that is the credit of the nation, at the 
credit of the nation. Although treacherously 
called a credit strengthening act, it shortly after 
its passage depreciated the Treasury note, despite 
the promise to pay it in coin from twenty-five to 
fifty per cent. 



REPUDIATION. 107 

At the time of the passage of this act, the 
order to receive the Treasury note for duties would 
have sent it to par or above for coin, as is proved 
by the fact that sometime before the pretended 
resumption of specie payments, such order from 
Secretary Sherman did send it above par, where it 
has been ever since. Such order issued &Ye years 
before it was, during the most of which time gold 
was at but a small premium, would probably have 
saved more than half the debt, and not to have 
excluded it at all, as our fathers never did, while we 
used the amount of money we did, as the history 
of France in her struggle with Germany shows, 
would have saved the necessity of any debt, 
but it would have thwarted the plans of bankers, 
gold gamblers and bondholders who were seeking 
to carry out the advice of British bankers to make 
a "great debt out of the war." 

The five-twenty bonds, remember, were all out 
in the hands of bankers and bondholders. Most 
of them were purchased when, owing to the ex- 
ception clause, the Treasury note was worth forty 
or fifty cents in specie. They were purchased 
with Treasury notes. Even John Sherman said 
that they ought to be paid in the same kind of 
money in which they were bought. Such was his 
language in his speeches and in a letter to a friend 
quoted by Senator Beck, he says : "I think the 
bondholder violates his promise when he refuses 
to take the same kind of money he paid for the 



108 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

bonds. * * * If tlie bondliolder can legally 
demand only tlie kind of money lie paid, then lie 
is a repudiator and an extortioner to demand 
money more valuable than he gave." 

At the time of the passage of this piratical act 
the Treasury note was worth, as compared with 
specie, twenty-five per cent, more than when he 
bought the bonds with it. He had received in 
gold interest, not required by the law and contrary 
to the interests of the people, much more than the 
whole amount he had paid for the bonds. At this 
time it made a difference to the people of more 
than $500,000,000 whether the bonds were paid in 
Treasury notes as the contract with the people 
required, or in specie. 

The people had no representatives, the bankers 
and bondholders by themselves and their 
attorneys, the lawyers, had a majority. 

It would be interesting to know how much of 
this enormous steal the bondholders divided with 
the lawyers. The people probably will never 
know till that day that shall lay open to the gaze 
of an astonished universe the villainies of the ages. 

In addition to the evidence of Hon. Thad. 
Stevens, Ben. Butler, John Sherman and many 
members of Congress and the letter of the law 
itself, the fact that at the same time the five- 
twenties were issued, ten-forty coin bonds were 
issued; that the coin bonds bore Ryq per cent, 
interest while the five-twenties that were payable 



REPUDIATION. 109 

in Treasury notes bore six per cent, shows that 
the five-twenties were payable, principal and 
interest, in Treasury notes. 

The government had no bonds to sell and no 
purpose or need to raise money, and there could 
be no pretense of benefiting the people nor any- 
one but the bondholders. This was another terri- 
ble thrust at the Treasury note, and at the credit 
of the country — being the second time it was 
feloniously deprived of its power to pay interest 
bearing obligations of the government, in express 
violation of the original and subsequent contracts. 
This act of March, 1869, which from its damage to 
the Treasury note and enormous gift out of the 
people's pockets to greedy bondholders, is entitled 
to be considered repudiation numbers two and 
three, and was only preparatory to another, which, 
if less expensive at the present and less manifestly 
an act of repudiation, was the most disgraceful bit 
of legislation in this whole series of legal outrages. 

Declaring the bonds bought with depreciated 
paper payable in coin was only a preparation to 
selling them in England. 

The Bible says the borrower is servant to the 
lender. England has tried to enslave us by arms 
and failed. In 1842, when we were out of debt, 
she refused to loan us $12,000,000 although asked 
to do so by a special agent of the government. 
She freely loaned money to the rebels during the 
late war, but refused us a single shilling. Self 



110 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PEEVENTION. 

respect, now that we had no need o£ borrowing, 
ought to have prevented onr touching a dollar of 
her money. 

From one to two hundred millions of surplus 
money was now in our Treasury. We collected 
five hundred millions of revenue annually and 
paid off one hundred millions of debt by sale of 
gold and purchase of bonds. None of the holders 
of the five-twenty bonds wished them paid, and 
none of them would have been payable for fifteen 
years. For one-half per cent, more interest than 
it was proposed to pay if it had been necessary to 
replace the loan, all the money could have been 
secured in this country. Becoming largely in- 
debted to England makes us tributary to her. A 
large part of the present plea for the demoneti- 
zation of silver and the ruin at home that would 
follow, arises from this unwise debt. The stealthy 
demonetization of silver in 1873, was instigated if 
not actually purchased, as is freely charged, by 
British bondholders. This debt gives opportunity 
for British bankers to intrigue in our affairs, and 
by their agents, liberally provided with gold, to 
constitute themselves a part of our corrupt legis- 
lative lobbies. It is probably the main reason foi 
our Treasury officials defying the law and paying 
out gold on paper obligations, and so increasing 
the national debt. Being one of the nations whose 
currency is professedly based on gold, it was 
greatly to her interest to so arrange this debt as to 



REPUDIATION. Ill 

make it a means of constantly draining gold from 
this country, and of course, if we insanely hold on 
to a specie base currency, of taking out the base 
of our currency and unsettling and destroying our 
industries. England, France and Germany are 
far wiser than this. They neyer allow any part of 
their great national debts to go abroad so as to 
give other nations a pretext for meddling in their 
affairs. 

As matters now stand England don't want our 
silver in which the bonds are still payable by the 
law of 1870, as they are payable in coin of the 
standard fineness of that date, and then silver was 
the standard. 

Yield to the present senseless and wicked cry to 
demonetize silver and the value of every dollar's 
worth of our property will be at the mercy of Eng- 
land. Eemember that in 1857 the sale of $7,000,000 
worth of bonds in New York, for which England 
carried off the gold, created the panic and conse- 
quent ruin of that date. The interest on this loan 
sent abroad was five per cent, in specie. Placing 
it was to cost one-half per cent., but actually cost 
three per cent. If we add the exchange on the in- 
terest, which will probably be one and two-thirds 
per cent., I think it will be apparent that if we 
had needed to borrow at all, it would have been 
far better to have done so at home. The design 
was to sell these bonds for gold, and invest the 
gold in five-twenty bonds in this country, but when 



112 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

S21,000,000 of them had been sold and that sum 
placed in the Bank of England, subject to our 
draft, the bank informed us that the gold would 
not be allowed to go abroad, and that if we insist- 
ed on taking it they would break off negotiations 
at once. Bonds at their price in London must be 
exchanged for gold there. 

Secretary Boutwell says we "were compelled to 
submit" to these disadvantageous and dishonorable 
terms. 

We did not need England's money, and ought 
never to have touched a dollar of it. Will we now 
foolishly, by demonetizing silver, allow her to draw 
hundreds of millions of gold for the base of her 
currency, at a cost to us of many times the amount 
originally paid for the bonds she holds, out of our 
own currency already so much contracted as to al- 
low our producing classes scarcely a decent sub- 
sistence? 

Contrast with this folly of our law-makers the 
wisdom of our fathers. 

To pay off a foreign loan made to our fathers 
during the Eevolution, by France, Spain and Hol- 
land, friendly nations which aided us at the risk of 
losing all, Congress in 1795 provided a home loan, 
giving our people one-half per cent, more interest 
than was paid abroad. Small bonds were made 
lov the purpose so that the people, not bankers and 
bondholders, might use them as money. 

" In this way," Webster says, " Hamilton smote 



REPUDIATION. 113 

the rock, and the waters gushed forth." "He 
touched the dead body of credit, and it sprang in- 
to life." So did not John Sherman and his com- 
peers. They created the " dead body of credit" 
that with its creators, ought to be condemned by 
every loyal man and lover of his kind. 



CHAPTEE XL 

HOW WALL STEEET MANIPULATED THE U. S. 
TKEASUEY IN ITS OWN INTEEEST. 

The exception clause was the first triumph of 
Wall street over the country, then in deadly con- 
flict with the Rebellion. If the country ever 
comes to realize, even in a small degree, the far- 
reaching and dreadful consequences of this act, it 
will, unless more Christian than most men, feel 
like praying, as Demosthenes did, against the trai- 
tors of his time, that the condign and terrible pun- 
ishments of the Almighty may follow the perpe- 
trators of it (whether in Congress or out) living 
or dead. 

At the beginning of the war, under the law of 
1846, bank notes were excluded from the Treasury, 
but Treasury notes, as they always had been, were 
receivable for all government dues. The first and 
one of the most damnable acts of Wall street was 
to make the government repudiate its own notes. 
Wall street is now afraid the people will make it 
take its own medicine. If God's law against ex- 
tortioners, which requires the restoration of four- 
fold, were enforced against Wall street, its million- 
aires would be poorer than the millions of wretched 

U4 



HOW WALL ST. MANIPULATED THE U. S. TREASUEY. 115 

tramps and paupers and criminals which its beast- 
ly selfishness has made. 

The $60,000,000 demand notes, payable in coin, 
issued in the beginning of the war and made full 
legal tender, as long as they were allowed to cir- 
culate, and some few of them are still out, on the 
gold board, in the Treasury, everywhere there was 
a call for money, were at a premium above gold, 
because they would do everything that gold could, 
and were far more convenient. With the gold kept 
constantly in the Treasury, the government might 
have issued $2,000,000,000 of such notes and they 
would have had a larger specie base than the issues 
of the banks of England. English banks never 
have more than one dollar in specie to twenty in 
liabilities in deposits and circulation. As every 
one at all posted in such matters knows, the prin- 
cipal danger is in deposits, and comparatively 
very little in circulation. The Treasury had no 
deposits, and the demand notes did all that specie 
could do. The people preferred paper; gamblers, 
not being able to make anything on specie, would 
have passed it into the Treasury as they did after 
the order to receive Treasury notes for duties. 

This was precisely what happened to France in 
her late struggle. Although she issued inconvert- 
ible paper, as we did, and about to the same 
amount, she did not wickedly demonetize it as we 
did, and the result was that at the close of the war 
her war debt was paid, and very soon after her in- 



116 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PEEVENTION. 

demnity to Germany of $1,100,000,000 was all 
paid, and the Bank of France, which is the gov- 
ernment's fiscal agent, had more specie within its 
vaults than all the banks of England, and perhaps 
of all Europe. 

Now let us observe how the robbery thus planned 
by Wall street was consummated. 

The Treasury kept over $100,000,000 of gold 
hoarded instead of using it to protect the credit of 
the nation. The process of debt paying was to 
sell gold at a premium for legal tenders, and to in- 
vest legal tenders in bonds. The law allowing such 
sales was passed March 17th, 1864 Previous to 
this time gold had been allowed to accumulate in 
the Treasury. Secretary Eessenden and even 
McCuUoch did not give notice of sales of gold and 
hence Wall street did not know when the blow 
would fall, but sales were not made wisely. The 
sale of $5,000,000 gold every day for a week at any 
time would have broken the combination of Wall 
street to keep up the price of gold. Several times 
the amount necessary to have raised the national 
credit to par with gold was lying idle in the Treas- 
ury, and the people were paying interest on it. 
At any time the order to receive the Treasury notes 
for duties would have had the same effect. 

On what is known on Wall street as " black Fri- 
day," in 1869, the sale of $5,000,000 in gold brought 
the premium from sixty per cent, down to thirty 
per cent., half way to par. 



HOW WALL ST. MANIPULATED THE U. S. TREASUEY. 117 

After the days of Chase and Fessenden there 
was a combination between the Treasury and Wall 
street to increase the premium on Treasury notes 
to drive them out of existence, so that bank bills 
might fill their place. The act of June 17th, 1869, 
was intended to prevent gold gambling. It pro- 
vided that neither gold nor sterling exchange 
should be sold for future delivery. 

Wall street could not stand that; its occupation 
of gambling in gold at the expense of the nation 
would be gone. Again it went to Washington, 
" terrible as an army with banners." A subserv- 
ient Congress again speedily obeyed, and this be- 
neficent law in behalf of the country lived just 
fifteen days. 

The beginning of Gen. Grant's administration 
was not only marked by the passage of the in- 
famous so-called " credit-strengthening" act, but it 
ushered in a new administration of the Treasury 
that will be forever infamous in the eyes of honest 
men who know what it was. 

Congress was induced to allow notice to be given 
of government sales of gold and purchase of 
bonds. Now Wall street was relieved of the trouble 
and loss that sudden sales of gold had given 
it. On the day that the government sold gold that 
commodity always ruled low, and instead of gold 
falling after the sales it always went up, and the 
street realized a handsome profit at the govern- 
ment's expense. 



118 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PEEVENTION. 

When the government gave notice that it would 
buy bonds, the price of bonds was pushed up to 
the highest possible figure; after the government's 
purchase of bonds they went down. Thus the 
government became the most profitable customer 
of a set of conscienceless gamblers. Thus vast 
private fortunes were made at the public expense. 
It would be interesting to know what high gov- 
ernment officials shared these accursed gains. 

It is not possible to explain such acts on any 
other ground. Ordinary business men, and these 
were certainly equal in business sense to ordinary 
business men, never do such things in the manage- 
ment of their own affairs. 

It became known that the Treasury did not pur- 
pose to sell gold during the month of September, 
1869. There was no special demand for gold, yet 
it went up day after day till it reached sixty per 
cent, premium. The sale of even a small amount 
of gold would have stopped this rise, as is shown 
by the fact that when finally $5,000,000 were sold, 
in one hour the premium went down to thirty per 
cent., and a small amount more sold would evi- 
dently have carried it down to par. 

About one year after the first repudiation act in 
1863, an act was passed in March, 1864, allowing 
the Secretary to prepay the interest on bonds. 
The government was paying its soldiers thirteen 
dollars per month in greenbacks that had been de- 
preciated by the exception clause to less than forty 



BOW WALL ST= MANIPULATED THE U. S. TEEASURY. 119 

cents on the dollar in gold. It would not listen to 
the request of its soldiers, its commercial and pro- 
ducing classes, to make the Treasury note, the free- 
man's money, receivable for duties, which would 
have sent it above par in one hour, and would have 
saved the necessity of issuing any more bonds. 
But in its eagerness to sell bonds for the base of 
the national bank issues, it authorized the interest 
which was paid in gold at six per cent, semi-annu- 
ally, to be paid one year in advance, which in 
greenbacks, at the rate gold was then selling, 
amounted to about twenty per cent. From year 
to year, instead of using gold to lessen the dis- 
count on notes, it was then used to prepay interest, 
and thus rapidly to increase the debt. This inter- 
est was immediately invested in Treasury notes; so, 
while Treasury notes were at two dollars and 
eighty cents for one dollar in gold, bondholders 
doubled their money every two years in green- 
backs. Investing these greenbacks in bonds, they 
are now, by the demonetization of silver and Treas- 
ury notes, seeking to make the bonds payable 
only in gold, which, owing to the contraction of the 
currency which they have brought about, is now 
worth more than four times as much as gold was 
when they bought the bonds in greenbacks at forty 
cents on the dollar in gold. In other words, they 
are now after the destruction of billions of other 
people's property by their selfish schemes, asking 
the people to pay and seeking by all means, fair 



120 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

and foul, to force tlie payment of their bonds, not 
in the same kind of money in which they bought 
them, but in a kind of money at least iive times as 
valuable as that was then, after receiving many 
times their real value in interest. It is evident 
that these men are seeking to bring about a time 
when the debt of the country can never be paid, 
when the laboring classes shall be their perpetual 
bondmen, and they, as the Hazard circular inti- 
mates, not responsible to keep them when they are 
worn out in their seryice. Unless the volume of 
active currency is quadrupled as it ought to be, and 
the increase loaned or paid out to the people and 
not given to the banks that time has already come. 
It will take more than the whole of the currency in 
the country to pay the interest on all the debts of the 
country every year, and when paid in to the usurer 
there is no way to get it out again except by bor- 
rowing, so that to keep the money in circulation 
the country must be kept in such a condition that 
an ever increasing number of men must borrow. 

Ye men of boundless greed, can ye not see that 
the end of this road must be repudiation, and ye 
that have repudiated every obligation to the labor- 
ing man, are the repudiators. As Demosthenes 
says, he that sows the seed is responsible for the 
crop. Having sown repudiation, it is only meet 
that you should reap repudiation. 

There are no occupations now that are perfectly 



HOW WALL ST. MANIPULATED THE U. S. TEEASURY. 121 

sure to be profitable but office-bolding and bank- 
ing. 

Much o£ the vast amount of money held in bank 
and loaned, has no chance to get into circulation 
and perform the office for which money was de- 
signed, that is, to effect exchanges, but is set on 
an eternal round passing from the usurers till to 
the pockets of his victims only to go back to the 
usurers till in payment of principal or interest. 
It is not necessary to suppose and we do not 
charge that all the men who have been parties to 
this terrible injustice which we have described, 
were conscious thieves. 

Men have never yet been able to see justice 
through a silver or gold dollar. That the party 
leaders who forced the measures through Congress, 
and pu.blic officials who were the ready tools of 
bondholders and stock and gold gamblers, did 
know what they were doing and are doing today, 
I have no doubt. Their names ought to be, and 
will at some time be, written on the same black- 
list on which appears that of Aaron Burr and 
Benedict Arnold. No honest man ever made a 
large fortune out of his country's service. 

"When a large part of the appropriations for 
public buildings is paid for stone for embelish- 
ment, that is shipped all over the country at vast 
expense, from quarries, of which the chairman of 
the Committe on Public Buildings is a silent part- 
ner, or a palace is built by an honorable secretary, 



122 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PEEVENTION. 

the bills for wliicli are unaccountably mixed with 
the public's accounts; when men who have sought 
office, ostensibly to serve the people, but in reality 
to serve coUossal railroad or banking or other 
monopolies, utter their fiery phillipics against the 
oppressor of the poor colored man, or their flaming 
zeal in favor of protection to the poor laborer, in 
the minds of honest men, their words will pass for 
nothing more than the well-known dodge of "stop, 
thief." 



CHAPTEE XII. 

BLIND LEADEKS OF THE BLIND. 

Great crimes liaye always seemed incredible to 
fche mass of men, and sometimes the greater the 
crime the more perfectly does it escape notice. 
Cicero's greatest difficulty in defeating the con- 
spiracy of Cataline was to make honest Eomans 
see that there was any conspiracy at all. That one 
of her consuls; that some of her chief nobles; 
that many grave and reverend senators; that men 
in high official positions; that what were supposed 
to be honorable men of every rank and calling 
should join a conspiracy to kill Kome's princi- 
pal citizens, to set fire in twelve places to the 
eternal city, her capital, to turn her slaves loose 
upon their masters, to free her usury-cursed 
masses from their oppressors, did not seem possi- 
ble till the arch traitor, confronted with the proof 
that, through the diligence of the consul, his plans 
had been divulged, fled in consternation. 

In that land where the beautiful in art and 
literature reached its highest development, whose 
ruins are our models in sculpture and architecture, 
and probably would be in painting, if its labors 
had been as imperishable; the echoes of whose 

123 



124 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

far-off music has come down tlie ages, and whose 
histories and poetry are the despair of all imi- 
tators, but for the recorded fact, it would be 
incredible that a majority of its most august and 
dignified court conspired to take the life of its 
wisest, most loving, most harmless citizen — So- 
crates. 

The very leaders in church and state, the 
scribes and Pharisees, when the Messiah came, 
after a three years' mission spent in ceaseless 
labors for the good of men, conspired against him, 
and murdered him, incredible as it must always 
seem. Yea, within the generation, honorable sen- 
ators and representatives sat in the nation's 
capital, under oath to support the constitution and 
government of the United States and plotted 
against the government, sending its arms and 
military stores to points where they would fall 
into the hands of the rebellion. Ought we to 
wonder that that same body is found capable of 
plotting a conspiracy against the rights of the 
laboring men of the country? All the other con- 
spiracies named were against life, this one ap- 
peared to be only against property, and the rights of 
the laborer, who had no representatives of his own 
class to defend him. Worship of party was one 
of the principal causes of the blindness of the 
masses to the reality of what was going on. One 
of the bitterest regrets of the writer's life is the rec- 
ollection of his own blindness that caused him 



BLIND LEADERS OF THE BLIND. 125 

implicitly to trust to the honesty of the party 
that boasted that it had liberated the black man. 
He little thought that he was helping to rivet 
fetters on the limbs of black and white alike. 

He has solemnly promised before God that, if He 
will forgive him for the past, he will be more vigi- 
lant in the future, and will do what he can to 
" undo the heavy burdens and let the oppressed go 
free." When on this subject he began to "see 
men as trees walking," he was assured by the 
party press that it was all right, that only bank- 
ers, who were guiding affairs, knew anything about 
finance. He has learned by experience that 
" cursed is the man who trusts in man." I be- 
lieve Bacon is accredited with the statement that, 
if there is a sufficient pecuniary motive, men will 
dispute gravitation itself. 

A corrupt and blind press was another of the 
greatest, perhaps the greatest, means of accom- 
plishing the great wickedness that is the cause of 
the present distress. Perhaps actual bribery or 
purchase was not often resorted to, but papers 
were bribed by their apparent money interests. 
In an article not long ago the New York Graphic 
showed that all the great New York papers were 
owned or controlled by millionaires, and of course 
run in the interest of money-lenders. All these 
great papers whose columns are the text-books 
on political economy of the masses, do not hesi- 
tate to say they are run for money and not for 



126 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

principle. The etliics they teach, are those that 
have a money value, not those which make men 
nobler and truer. Take as an example the Chicago 
Tribune, a paper whose net income is probably 
$300,000. Its senior editor, at a recent meeting 
of the Press Club held in Chicago, as is reported 
in the Congregationalist, said for substance — I 
quote the words of that paper—" A shrewd news- 
paper man will soon learn what the people want, 
and give it to them. * * * Many years ago, 
when he was a young man, he had started a paper 
with a high-minded purpose; he was desirous of 
leading the public in the paths of goodness and 
virtue. But as he grew older, he found that 
such papers were not in demand; he changed his 
paper in accordance with the financial returns. 
The object to sight is the almighty dollar, and the 
question is, does it pay?" The same paper, as I 
remember, a few years ago, gave an account of 
the visit of one of its reporters to the den of an 
astrologer in the garb of a widow lady who de- 
sired to have her fortune told. The oily-tongued 
villain informed the supposed widow that she 
was under a spell, and intimated that the spell 
was a person, and that he would remove the spell 
for fifty dollars, when she would marry the right 
person and be happy; otherwise, she certainly 
would be miserable. The reporter said that poor 
girls who worked hard for their money were actu- 
ally paying this unmitigated scoundrel fifty 



BLIND LEADERS OF THE BLIND. 127 

dolJars apiece. Several Cliicago dailies, to tlie 
extent of the pay they get for advertising, are 
partners, regularly, with such creatures. 

This is in accordance with the frank avowal of 
the Tribune editor, but it is worse than heathen- 
ism. Juvenal, the Roman satirist, makes his 
friend Umbricius say, as one of his reasons for 
leaving the capital, that he could not promise the 
death of a father, meaning he did not approve of 
fortune-tellers. Horace, the Roman poet, also 
warns his readers not to patronize astrologers. 

Papers run on the principles openly avowed in 
this country, are more dangerous to liberty than 
all the nihilists that ever came to us across the 
ocean. Perhaps it is too charitable to class such 
papers as blind leaders of the blind. But it 
seems to me that men who actually see the ruin 
sure to result from such an unprincipled course 
cannot be base enough to pursue it. Even Chris- 
tian papers, whose editors were blinded by their 
education, have helped to cover up the real facts. 

Ridicule has been one of the chief reliances of 
the men who have sought, so successfully, to con- 
summate the robbery of the laboring classes. It 
is a terrible shaft, oftener found in the quiver of 
the man that knows he has no arguments to use, 
and oftener used to protect abuses than to cor- 
rect them. There is a profound philosophy under- 
lying the Scripture that forbids us to call a man 
a fool. To call a man a fool is in many cases to 
make him one, 



128 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PEEVENTION. 

To avoid tlie Scripture threatening a common 
dodge is to say one is a lunatic, or crazy, whose 
argument it is not eonyenient to meet. "When the 
few men who saw what was going on and were 
honest enough to try to expose the fraud and 
robbery, tried to do so, they were by a hireling 
press and corrupt politicians and often by men 
who were honest but ignorant, mercilessly 
assailed and treated to all the vile epithets their 
vocabulary of billingsgate afforded. 

Men of great influence, like Gen. Grant, who 
knew no more about money than babes, except to 
spend it, by cunning knaves who expected to make 
fortunes by it, were prompted to cry " ragbaby," 
"fiat money," "dishonest money," and other such 
things. 

Have you ever seen a little girl playing with a 
doll baby and calling it pet names, and said to her 
contemptuously it was nothing but a dirty old rag? 
If you have, you have seen her throw it as far as 
she could, and assume the same contemptuous 
bearing and words you have exhibited. 

Men are only children of- a larger growth. I 
believe that opprobrious epithets that, as arguments, 
were merely logical fallacies, did more to make 
the monstrous steal possible than all the legislation 
of Congress. Those who can at all remember know 
what enthusiastic Greenbackers all Bepublicans 
were, and even Democrats were scarcely less 
friendly to them. What has come over the spirit 



BLIND LEADEES OF THE BLIND. 129 

of their dreams? Greenbacks were the only 
thing that saved our country in the terrible conflict 
when every dollar of gold and silver skulked away, 
or fled the country. John Sherman says that, 
since they were received into the Treasury, they 
have, at the urgent request of the bondholders, 
paid hundreds of millions of gold obligations. 
Besides this, they have always faithfully paid all 
private debts, and have cost the people next to 
nothing. This is their crime in the eyes of specie 
mongers, for which they must die. Will the 
people confirm the unjust and criminal sentence? 

CLASS LEGISLATOKS. 

English history, as given by Alison, shows that 
the lowest class to whom the franchise was ex- 
tended by the Keform Bill, the urban XIO to X20 
rate payers being the majority of the voters, took 
all power into their own hands. They were 
chiefly the traders and monied men. It was to 
their interest that money should be dear and com- 
modities cheap. By a sharp contraction of the 
currency, enjoumbered landed possessions were 
made to fall readily into their possession. With 
these came greatly enhanced political power, 

"They halved the income and doubled the debts 
of the landed proprietors, while they doubled the 
exchangeable value of the income of the inhabi- 
tants of towns." 

From this, and what appears to be similar facts 

9 



130 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PKEVENTION. 

in French history, the writer thinks that he has 
derived a law that the lowest class to which the 
franchise extends will govern the whole state. 
Perhaps in the end it may be so, but our case as 
yet does not look that way. 

The same classes that seized the power under 
the Eeform Bill there, have done the same thing 
here. 

As they did there they have, by legislation, 
freed themselves mostly from the burdens of tax- 
ation and by a great contraction of the currency 
have far more than doubled the weight of other 
people's debts and taxes, and taken far more than 
half from the value of other people's property 
while vastly increasing the amount and far more 
than doubling the value of their own — that is, 
money. 

The means by which this small minority of the 
voters have secured such enormous results in 
their own favor are: 

First, superior knowledge on their part, and on 
the part of the robbed masses inherited prejudices 
in favor of a false money system. Second, the 
free use of money to buy legislation in their favor; 
to buy, in one way and another, newspapers; to 
buy, consciously or unconsciously, ministers, 
teachers, men of influence in every calling; to buy 
the support of political parties, and where to 
carry out their purposes they must, the popular 
vote itself. Third, this vast money monopoly has 



BLIND LEADERS OE THE BLIND. 131 

brouglit into existence a large number of other 
monster monopolies wliich it aids and abets to get 
their aid against the plundered masses. 

The founders of the government saw the 
danger of allowing bankers and other monopo- 
lists through their vast concentrated capital to elect 
themselves and their attorneys to make laws for 
their own advantage. 

In the "Debates of Congress" of 1789 and 1790, 
pages 445 and 446, United States Senate, we find 
recorded a motion to amend the ninth section of 
the Constitution, as follows: 

"Nor shall any person holding an office or stock 
in any institution in the nature of a bank for issu- 
ing or discounting bills or notes payable to bearer 
or order, under the authority of the United States 
be a member of either House while he holds such 
stock, but no power to grant any charter of incor- 
poration or any charter or other monopoly shall be 

implied." 

Tuesday, January 16th, it passed— yeas 13, nays 
12. Now despite the fact that bankers as a class 
would not be entitled to more than two or three 
members, they have nearly a majority in Congress. 
If you add the members concerned in other mon- 
opolies, there are more than a majority. When 
John Quincy Adams was in Congress, he held that 
he had no right to vote on the subject of the 
National Bank of which he was a stockholder, 
until he had disposed of his stock. These men 



132 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

have no such scruples, but seek office under the 
pretense that they will represent the interests of 
the people, and then shamelessly betray their 
interests to subserve their own. 

There is a fallacy in the public mind, that law- 
yers from their education are peculiarly fitted to 
be law makers. The fact is their education unfits 
them for the lofty duties of statesmanship. The 
utter failure of the laws which are their workman- 
ship, which fill our statute books, to secure the 
ends of justice, is abundant proof of their unfitness 
to make laws. Their education teaches them to 
slavishly follow precedents. It is the business of 
the lawmaker to make precedents. His education 
should fit him to look at a subject from every side. 
If he dare not venture where there are no pre- 
cedents, as the man who is only a lawyer seldom 
does, he must fail as a lawmaker. The legislator 
should be a man whom education and calling makes 
an independent man, who is not simply the hire- 
ling of another; the very habit of taking fees is a 
dangerous qualification for a lawmaker. Can a 
Congressman take, as an attorney for a company or 
an individual, a fee to secure a contract to be paid 
out of the government funds, and be honest ? 
Many attorneys seek office, not to serve the people 
but to get where they can command larger fees. 
They mystify their consciences, if they have any 
left after years of practice in freeing criminals 
from justice, by the plea that it is only prof as- 



BLIND LEADEBS OP THE BLIND. 133 

sional, but in fact they serve, not the people who 
pay their salaries, but their clients. There are 
some high minded honorable lawyers whose com- 
mon sense and sterling honesty their one-sided 
education has not spoiled, who make real states- 
men, but their number is not large. As a rule 
intelligent farmers, or men of almost any other 
calling are better fitted for statesmanship, and yet 
owing to the fact that they have cheek and tongue 
and leisure to attend caucuses and conventions, 
and can get money, they manage to secure the 
•majority of the legislative offices. The conse- 
quence is they justify the terrible denunciation of 
the Saviour when he said: "Wo unto you also, ye 
lawyers, for ye lade men with burdens grievous to 
be borne, and you yourselves touch not the burdens 
with one of your fingers." 

The bankers and other monopolists, with the 
attorneys, a large portion of whom are not above 
taking fees, constitute almost the whole of Con- 
gress. But for the fact that some of the banker 
class are yet, in intention, and so far as the blind- 
ing nature of self interest will allow them to see 
the truth, in action honorable and upright men, 
there would be no hope at all for the laborer, so 
long as the present state of affairs continues. 
Although in the majority, unJess he rouses himself 
and breaks the party fetters that bind him, and 
votes only for men who will regard man, not simply 
money and its interests, he can look forward to 



134 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

little more than one unending round of toil, with 
few of the enjoyments and blessings of life, end- 
ing only with the grave. 

All this is utterly and cruelly wrong, and a God 
of justice who for every drop of black man's blood 
drawn by the oppressor's lash, drew one or more 
drops of white man's blood with the sword during 
four years of national and individual suffering, 
will certainly in the end see that every dollar 
filched from the hard earnings of His humble poor 
is repaid with a terrible interest of agony and 
retribution. 

Class legislators naturally produce class legisla- 
tion. If we wish to get rid of one we must pre- 
vent the other. Such prevention is entirely pos- 
sible if the people so will it. We do not charge 
that bankers and lawyers are necessarily more 
selfish than other men. We do say that having a 
great and direct self interest, and money to buy 
legislation, they are less fit to be trusted as legis- 
lators; that no class of men can be trusted to 
guard the rights of other classes. 



CHAPTEE XIII. 

USURY. 

We come now to consider tliat wHch was the 
propellent motive as well as the means of accom- 
plishing most of the injustice we have described. 

It has been one of the prime causes of the 
downfall of nations from the ruin of Egypt to the 
present. I propose to show that usury is pointedly 
and unmistakably condemned and forbidden by 
God, and cannot be sustained by reason. The 
first statement of God's law on this subject is in 
Exodus, twenty-second chapter. . 

"If thou lend money to any of my people that is 
poor by thee, thou shalt not be to him as an usurer, 
neither shalt thou lay upon him usury." This 
law is found, not among ceremonial precepts which 
were temporary, but among moral and govern- 
mental laws that abide. One year later, according 
to the accepted chronology, we find the law again 
repeated with additions and explanations that 
seem to have been needful to its proper enforce- 
ment. 

Leviticus twenty-fifth, chapter 35, 37: "And if 
thy brother be waxen poor and fallen in decay 
with thee,then thou shalt relieve him; yea though 

135 



136 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

he he a stranger; tliat lie may live with thee but 
fear thy God; that thy brother may live with thee." 

"Thou shalt not give him thy money upon 
usury, nor lend him thy victuals for increase." 

We find not only from this passage but from 
others still more positive and particular that God 
did not allow men to refuse to give such relief: 
Deuteronomy 15:8, 9: "But thou shalt open 
thine hand wide unto him, and shalt surely lend 
him sufficient for his need in that which he needeth. 

Beware that there be not a thought in thy 
wicked heart, saying, the seventh year, the year of 
release is at hand, and thine eye be evil against 
thy poor brother, and thou givest him nought, and 
he cry to the Lord against thee." 

We see also from the above and the first and 
second verses of the same chapter that if this 
money which the well-to-do man was obliged to 
lend without usury even to a stranger and 
sojourner could not be paid before the jubilee it 
must be released. 

"At the end of every seventh year thou shalt 
make a release. And this is the manner of the 
release: Every creditor that lendeth aught unto 
his neighbor shall release it, he shall not exact it 
of his neighbor or of his brother, because it is 
called the Lord's release." 

It would seem that in the forty years between 
the first and second and fuller publication of the 
law, usurers had taken the ground now generally 



USUEY. 



137 



assumed, that usury was "unlawful interest," and 
that interest was right. To meet this case usury 
is supplemented by the expression *' or increase." 
This can leave no possible doubt that all increase 
or pay for the use of money was strictly forbidden. 
Usurers the world over and in all time are noted 
for finding ways to evade the law. It appears that 
some of that time had learned to dodge the letter of 
the law, and loaned provisions instead of money 
and took increase, so it is added, "nor lend him 
thy victuals for increase." 

It may safely be said, just as it is with men, 
what God repeats he lays particular stress upon. In 
one case it is said " He may live with thee." And 
in another that "thy brother may live with thee." 
What cares the ordinary usurer whether his victim 
lives with him or, indeed, lives at all, so that he 
can get his interest? A short time before his 
death the great Law-giver, not only for the Jews, 
but for the world, in the book of Deuteronomy, 
which means the second law, because it repeats 
laws before enacted, reiterates, and in a most 
solemn manner, under the sanction, on the one 
hand, of his blessings, if the people kept all his 
laws, and the most terrible curses if they did not 
keep and obey them, confirms them, and pledges 
the people to perpetual obedience to them. Since 
that time the terrible punishments threatened 
against disobedience have been remarkably ful- 
filled to the letter in the case of the Jews. The 



138 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

law, as somewhat condensed here, is: "Thou 
shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother: usury 
of money, usury of anything that is lent upon 
usury: Unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon 
usury: but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend 
upon usury: that the Lord thy God may bless 
thee in all thou settest thy hand to in the land 
whither thou goest to possess it." From this we 
may infer that the ingenious usurer had again 
been racking his brain to find out how to get some- 
thing for nothing. To forever close up any loop- 
hole for such dodge, it is added: "Usury of 
anything that is lent upon usury." As in a former 
case, the blessing of God in all they should do in 
their new home is made dependent upon obedience 
to this law. If God is the unchangeable being 
that he is represented to be in the Bible, and so 
hated usury then that he would terribly curse the 
people who practiced it upon their fellows, how 
must he regard it now when everywhere in pro- 
fessedly Christian countries he sees the monstrous 
inequality, the fabulously rich few, and the 
wretchedly poor, and criminal because poor, masses 
that it always and everywhere creates. But the 
sharp eye of the usurer or his apologists detects 
an exception in the letter of the law as last given. 
We might dismiss this exception with the obvious 
remarks that an exception cannot effect the repeal 
of its law. That the unmistakable meaning of 
the law requires a Christian not to take usury of a 



USUEY. 139 

Christian; would forbid a citizen to take money of 
his fellow citizen. That if this law were heeded 
by Christians, usury would soon lose its poWer to 
harm any one. That the plain teaching of the 
New Testament, in the sheet that was let down to 
Peter, and in the poor man that fell among thieves, 
is that the relation of Jew and stranger has 
ceased, and that " there is neither Jew nor Gentile, 
bond nor free, but all are one in Christ Jesus," 
and that one in rights under the law — a Jew. But 
we propose to leave no loophole to get out of this 
argument, and we call particular attention to the 
following facts : The word rendered stranger in 
Leviticus 25: 35 is in the Hebrew ger, and 
means a sojourner. This stranger had to be 
circumcised, as is apparent in Genesis 17: 13, 14 
Exodus 12: 44, 48. He had all the rights of any 
Jew, even the rights to relief when poor and to 
God's release. Genesis 12: 49. 

With the Jews he was required to swear to 
observe all the laws, including this upon usury. 
Deuteronomy 29: 11, and 31: 12. John 8: 33. 

The stranger having all the rights of a Jew 
under one, and the same law was expressly exempt 
from usury. Leviticus 25 : 35, 37. 

Observe that this stranger is a brother expressly 
so called in the thirty-fifth verse. 

When this law in Leviticus was given, and for 
almost forty years afterward the Jews were in the 
desert and had no neighboring nations, and hence 



140 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

no immediate need of a law to regulate their 
intercourse with external nations. 

At the time of the giving the law in Deuter- 
onomy, they are just about to take their place 
among the nations. The Hebrew word that is 
used for stranger in this passage is nokri and does 
not mean sojourner, as does the word in Leviticus, 
but one of an outside nation, a stranger, or 
foreigner. 

This stranger had none of the rights of a Jew. 
He must not eat the passover or of the sacrifice. 
Exodus 29: 33. Leviticus 22: 10, 13. He had no 
right to God's release at the jubilee, Deuteron- 
omy 15 : 3, here rendered foreigner. Tacitus, the 
Roman historian, says that the Jew was not allowed 
to eat or sleep with one of another nation unless, 
he was a proselyte. 

The "Septuagint Greek" translates the Hebrew 
ger by the very word proselyte, but in Deuteron- 
omy 15: 3 it has the word allotrion, also in 
Deuteronomy 23 : 19, which is the apparent excep- 
tion in the usury law. This word means, as it is 
translated in Deuteronomy 15: 3, foreigner, the 
stranger of whom Tacitus speaks. 

We see then unmistakably that this apparent 
exception is no exception at all, but that God's 
law, obedience to which has the promise of His 
loving favor, and disobedience to which is threat- 
ened with the most terrible punishment, strictly 
forbids usury, except in the case of outside 



USURY. 141 

heathen, and as severely forbids it in their case 
when they accept the true religion and become 
His children. 

No nation gives to the subjects of other nations 
the same rights which its own enjoy, even when 
they make a temporary home within its borders, 
unless they formally adopt its government and 
swear allegiance to the same. This is just what 
Moses and Joshua caused the strangers to do, and 
those who did it had all the rights of the Jews, 
even to the septennial release from all debts. 

The same command to lend, hoping for nothing, 
is found in the New Testament. Matthew 5 :42 — 
" Give to him that asketh thee and from him that 
would borrow of thee turn not away." Luke 6: 35 
" But love your enemies, and do good and lend, 
hoping for nothing: and your reward shall be 
great, and ye shall be children of the Highest." 

Where the precept is plain, the real Christian 
does not need to seek for the reason, yet reasons 
are not wanting in this case. 

The external nations were not Christian but 
heathen — rebels not merely against the nation that 
was God's chosen people, but against God Him- 
self. Judaism was not merely a nation, living 
among other nations, but it was the true religion 
domiciled among the false. The devotees of the 
false religion, especially in an outward material 
age, to induce them to accept the true, must see 
that its followers had advantages that they did 
not have. 



142 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

The Eoman historian, Tacitus, tells ns that all 
the Jewish customs, especially religious customs, 
were just the reverse of those of other nations. 
The hog was an abomination to a Jew. The Romans 
offered it in sacrifice. In this state of affairs, to 
keep the peace, and to secure the progress of the 
true religion, God must in some way and to some 
extent subject the surrounding nations to the 
Jews. 

I think it will be apparent from facts that I 
shall give that the subjection was that of 

DEBTS, AND THE MEANS OF IT, USURY. 

Proverbs 22: 7. "The rich rule over the poor, 
and the borrower is servant to the lender." To 
the stranger that was a foreigner, as we have 
seen, the Jews might lend upon usury, and they 
had not the benefit of "God's release;" hence 
they were in a state of permanent bondage until 
they paid the debt; becoming proselytes, they had 
a right to the " Lord's release." In the book of 
Deuteronomy, where the first permission to take 
usury of a stranger, a foreigner, is found in this 
passage that shows conclusively that our explana- 
tion of that permission is the right one, fifteenth 
chapter, sixth verse, "For the Lord thy God 
blesseth thee as he promised thee, and thou shalt 
lend unto many nations, but thou shalt not bor- 
row, and thou shalt reign over many nations, but 
they shall not reign over thee," 



USUBY. 



143 



The permission to lend is to outside nations, and 
the result of the lending is the subjection of the 
nations. The last clause of the 12th verse of the 
28th chapter is " and thou shalt lend unto many 
nations, and thou shalt not borrow." 

Among the curses pronounced upon the Jews if 
they did not obey all the laws, including the law 
against usury, subjection to the stranger by means 
of poverty is threatened. Deuteronomy 28 : 43, 44. 
The stranger here mentioned is the proselyte, not 
the foreigner. Even in their distress because of their 
sin, God would not let them be enslaved by usury 
to idolatrous nations. The passage is very strik- 
ing, and is as follows: 

"The stranger that is within thee shall get up 
above thee very high; and thou shalt come down 

very low. , i j 

"He shall lend to thee, and thou shalt not lend 

to him; he shall be the head and thou shalt be the 

tail." 

Both should be parts of one great religious 
movement, but the stranger, instead of the Jew, 
the head of it. The descendant of Abraham 
should, because of disobedience, shrivel up to the 
dimensions only of its tail, as he is to-day. 

Deuteronomy, from the 27th to the 34th chapter, 
is commended as good reading for those who have 
by means of usury enslaved the laboring masses 
of their countrymen not only to themselves but 



144 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

also to British usurers, thus making their own 
country subject to England. 

Let the Christian and citizen notice: 

1st. God's law forbids all usury for him unless 
he can find some outside heathen from whom to 
exact it. 

2d. The New Testament rule, as illustrated in 
the case of the man who fell among thieves, for- 
bids even that by showing that the stranger is 
abolished. 

We have shown positively that the permission 
to take usury of strangers was not an exception to 
the usury law, but an added law to regulate inter- 
course with foreign nations; that when he became 
a proselyte he was exempt from the same; that 
there are no strangers now, hence the law has ex- 
pired by its own limitation. 

Having now given a complete view of the law, 
let us see whether it was enforced or suffered to 
become a dead letter. Prov. 28 :8. " He that by 
usury and unjust gain increaseth his substance, he 
shall gather it for him that will pity the poor." 
The Hebrew, as given in a marginal reading for 
unjust gain is increase. The "Septuagint Greek" 
and "Young's Concordance" both translate the He- 
brew iarhiih in the same way so that we have here 
both a translation and a comment. Increase here is 
declared to be unjust gain, and the man is con- 
demned as unjust who takes any increase. 

In the 15th Psalm, in answer to the questions 



USUKY. 145 

" Lord, who shall abide in Thy tabernacle ? Who 
shall dwell in Thy holy hill?" In summing up the 
short list of persons declared eligible to such ex- 
altation, David says : " He that putteth not out his 
money to usury, nor taketh reward against the in- 
nocent. He that doeth these things shall never be 
moved." 

If the Psalmist was right the great crop of 
usurers and lawyers have small show for the pos- 
session of corner lots on God's "holy hill." 

Isaiah 24:2, in the brief summary of the classes 
of persons who had alike sinned and who shall 
alike be punished with utter destruction, the prophet 
says it shall be "as with the taker of usury so 
with the giver of usury to him." He goes on to 
say: " The earth also is defiled under the inhabit- 
ants thereof because they have transgressed the 
laws, changed the ordinance, broken the everlast- 
ing covenant." 

" Therefore hath the curse devoured the earth 
and they that dwell therein are desolate." God 
has not changed his opinion of usury, and there is 
little hope that he will change his practice con- 
cerning it. After Jeremiah had been compelled to 
prophecy the destruction and captivity of the 
Jews because of their wickedness, and had doubt- 
less been called a lunatic and crazy and every 
other vile epithet that the smart men of his time 
could think of, he cried out : " "Wo is me, my mother, 
that thou hast borne me, a man of strife, and 

10 



146 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PEEVENTION. 

a man of contention to the whole earth! I have 
neither lent on usury nor have men lent to me on 
usury; yet every one of them doth curse me." 

Evidently in his estimation, the most wicked and 
censurable thing he could think of, was taking and 
giving usury 

In the 18tli chapter of Ezekiel, God begins by 
declaring that all souls are His, and that the soul 
that sins shall die, and goes on to declare positively 
what kind of sinners shall die: "He hath given 
forth upon usury, and hath taken increase. Shall 
he then live? He shall not live; he that hath done 
all these abominations, he shall surely die; his 
blood shall be upon him." Positively and nega- 
tively the same judgment is repeated, three times 
in the same chapter. The design of repetition is 
always to make more emphatic and certain the 
thing repeated. 

In the 22d chapter of Ezekiel the general cor- 
ruption of the prophets, priests, princes and peo- 
ple of Jerusalem is shown and the sins for which 
she was to be destroyed and the remnant of her 
people sent into captivity. Prominent among her 
sins are these: " In thee have they taken gifts to 
shed blood; thou hast taken usury and increase, 
and thou hast greedily gained of thy neighbor by 
extortion, and hast forgotten me, saith the Lord 
God." God charges the several classes of sinners 
as follows : " There is a conspiracy of her proph- 
ets in the midst thereof, like a roaring lion raven- 



USURY. 147 

ing the prey; they have devoured souls; they have 
taken the treasure and precious things; they have 
made her many widows in the midst thereof." 
" Her priests have violated my law, and have pro- 
faned mine holy things; they have put no differ- 
ence between the holy and the profane, neither 
have they showed difference between the unclean 
and the clean and have hid their eyes from my Sab- 
baths, and I am profaned among them." " Her 
princes" (presidents, members of Congress, rich 
bankers, great landholders and business men) "in 
the midst thereof are like wolves ravening the 
prey, to shed blood," (the blood of suicides, wid- 
ows and orphans, that have died of want and dis- 
ease and despair, the result of their heartless 
selfishness ) " and to destroy souls to get dishonest 
gain." "And her prophets have daubed them 
with untempered mortar" (calling their unlawful 
pursuit of gain sharp business sense, and reproach- 
ing their victims as incompetent to manage busi- 
ness affairs )" seeing vanity and divining lies unto 
them, saying thus saith the Lord God when the 
Lord hath not spoken." 

" The people of the land have used oppression 
and exercised robbery, and vexed the poor and 
needy; yea, they have oppressed the stranger 
wrongfully." (Was there ever a time when these 
words were more strikingly true than the pres- 
ent?) * * * " Therefore have I poured out 
mine indignation upon them; I have consumed 



148 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

them with the fire of my wrath; their own way 
have I recompensed upon their heads, saith the 
Lord." 

As much as to say they destroyed one another 
by usury, extortion and wrong, therefore their own 
way, which is to destroy one another, I have 
brought upon them, and utterly destroyed them. 
They sowed the wind, they have reaped the whirl- 
wind, for " whatsoever man soweth that shall he 
reap." 

We have seen how during a period of a thousand 
years God denounced usury and punished men for 
practicing it by captivity and loss of all things and 
even death itself. 

We shall now consider a case where He forced, 
through His servant, Nehemiah, all the Jews to 
give it up. Nehemiah 5 :3. " Some also there were 
who said, we have mortgaged our lands, vine- 
yards and houses, that we might buy corn, be- 
cause of the dearth. There were also who said, 
we have borrowed money for the king's tribute, 
and that upon our lands and vineyards. Yet now 
our flesh is as the flesh of our brethren, our children 
as their children; and lo, we bring unto bondage 
our sons and daughters to be servants, and some 
of our daughters are brought unto bondage 
already; neither is it in our power to redeem 
them: for other men have our lands and vine- 
yards. And I was angry when I heard their cry 
and these words. Then I consulted with myself, 



USURY. 149 

and I rebuked the nobles and the rulers and said 
unto them, ye exact usury every one of his brother? 
and I set a great assembly against them." 

Observe that it is right to be angry at injustice, 
and as we have seen before and see here, usury is 
injustice; that if a man of God gets angry in such 
a case and wants to consult, unless he wants the 
advice of interested parties, he must sometimes 
consult himself; that the nobles and rulers, mem- 
bers of Congress and public officials whose duty it 
is to protect the poor against such extortion and 
robbery, are themselves seeking to get their hands 
still deeper into the poor people's pockets, and to 
get still more mortgages on everything they have 
left; that it is the duty of every real man of God 
to set a great assembly against them. " Also I 
said it is not good that ye do; ought ye not to walk 
in the fear of our God because of the re^Droach of 
the heathen, our enemies." Men don't walk in the 
fear of God who take usury. This is God's word, 
not mine. My Christian friend, " ought you not 
to walk in the fear of our God" because of His 
enemies. He has said, " The reproaches of them 
that reproach thee have fallen upon me." The 
enemy of God who yet has some feelings of 
humanity sees the terrible injustice and wrong that 
prevails and observes that you either practice, or 
sanction or palliate the injustice, and naturally con- 
cludes that the God you worship sanctions it too. 
Hence his moral nature recoils from you and he 
hates and despises the God you worship. 



150 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

God by the mouth of Nehemiah goes on to say, 
" I pray you let us leave off this usury. Restore, 
I pray you to them, even this day, their lands, 
their vineyards, their olive yards and their houses, 
also the hundredth part of the money and of the 
corn, the wine and the oil, that ye exact of them.' 

The hundredth part seems to have been the 
usury they were allowed by the law to take of for- 
eigners, as we have seen, probably for the purpose 
of subjecting the heathen to the Jew, in part at 
least for his own good and for the security of the 
Jew. This may also have been allowed in part for 
governmental reasons. To freely allow foreigners 
to borrow money and carry it out of the country, 
perhaps for a long time, would so contract the cur- 
rency as to very seriously oppress the poor and 
producing class who were the great body of the 
people. 

See how the rich who, as James says, are " they 
that oppress you," took advantage of this twelve 
per cent, which was allowed to be put upon for- 
eigners to subject them and discourage the expor- 
tation of money, to oppress and enslave their poor 
brethren. 

Always and everywhere the usurer readily earns 
the denunciation that the Saviour hurled, doubt- 
less, at him and his abettors when He said that we 
should beware of the scribes "Which devour 
widows' houses and for a pretense niake long 
prayers." 



USURY. 



151 



Tlie result in this memorable case was that all 
the people executed the " Lord's release" giyingup 
interest and principal and releasing lands and 
Yineyards and olive yards. . , . , 

God says all souls are His and it is His right to 
protect the poor, since the rich man and the op- 
pressor owes Him everything, even life itself, and 
it was by means of His favor and protection that 

he got his riches. 

When the country was in peril it took by torce 
the son and only stay of the poor widow, paid him 
in money that at the dictation of bankers and gold 
gamblers was depreciated to forty cents m gold, 
in many cases buried him in a Southern clime; 
if he left any posterity it has put upon their necks 
a heavy yoke of usury. Hard as this was, except 
the outrage inflicted at the instigation of usurers 
and gamblers, it was, perhaps, justified m the emer- 
gency. But certainly if it took men, it should not 
have been less sparing of money, but, as it did ot 
men, so it shouldhave taken money enough to save 
the country, if there was enough in it. As it was the 
rich managed to shift from themselves most of the 
burden of saving the state, and are now enjoying 
the lion's share of the benefits, and after coming 
fabulous millions of wealth out of their country^s 
distress, the patrimony saved by the soldiers 
efforts is heavily mortgaged to them, and what 
with the heavy load of usury and the low price 
and dull sale of the products of their labor caused 



152 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

by a wicked contraction of tliG volume of money, 
the children of the country's saviors are, many 
of them, little better off than slaves. 

What the country needs is a Nehemiah to 
"break every yoke and let the oppressed go free," 
and to wrest from the usurious oppressors the 
" Lord's release." 

We have seen that the middle wall of partition 
is broken dovrn, and that the Gentile has all the 
rights of the Jew, including exemption from usury. 

It is a principle of law, that while the reason 
remains the law remains. The oppressive character 
of usury is the same now that it was when, as we 
have seen, God swore his people, under Moses, 
under Joshua, under Nehemiah, to refrain from 
practicing it, promising his favor if they obeyed, 
and denouncing the most terrible punishments, 
including captivity and death, to all except a rem- 
nant, who should be dispersed among the nations 
if they disobeyed. 

But some suppose that Christ repealed the law 
in the passage in Matthew, twenty-fifth chapter, 
and in Luke, nineteenth chapter. 

The most obvious, and as I think all sufficient 
answer to this last is that a law that has received 
the most formal and emphatic sanction of the law 
giver can never be repealed by mere reference to 
an opposite custom in the way of illustration nor 
in any other way than by direct and formal repeal 
such as Christ gave in case of Moses' law of 



trsuEY. 153 

divorce. This law had been in force fifteen 
hundred years and the prophets had foretold the 
destruction of Jerusalem and the dispersion of 
the remnant of the Jews for its violation. Is it 
possible that under such circumstances the law 
was repealed? If so, the repeal did not prevent 
any of the consequences of its violation that had 
been threatened. 

The law executed is certain proof that the law 
was not repealed. By the same kind of proof we 
can readily show that Christ approved of the 
unjust judge, and of injustice and disregard of 
God and man; of the tricky steward that cheated 
his Lord; that the apostles approved of horse 
racing, boxing and even war itself. 

Barnes, in his notes on these passages, says the 
nobleman in question was Archelaus, who went to 
Bome to be confirmed in the government he had 
inherited. That because of his cruel and unjust 
character, fifty Jews went to Home to protest 
against his confirmation. These were his subjects 
that would not have him to reign ovsr them. 

If this is so, of course it was only in keeping 
with his character that he should require his 
servants to take usury for him. The' passage in 
Proverbs declares increase to be unjust gam. 

If we can make the passages refer to Christ, as 
they probably do in some particulars, then to 
make usury mean interest as some do, makes the 
passages inconsistent in several particulara 



154 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

The term "occupy" is in Greek, engage in 
business. When he called them to account he 
wanted to know how much they had gained, not 
by u.sury, but by business or "by trading." The 
first servant said: "Lord, thy pound has gained 
by work, (I give the meaning of the Greek) not 
by usury, ten pounds." To suppose that it had 
gained ten pounds by usury at the only rate named 
would make both master and man at least centen- 
arians at the time of this reckoning, as we cannot 
suppose them to have been less than twenty years 
old when this remarkable piece of financiering 
began. Then to suppose that eleven men all lived 
eighty years to give and receive the account, taxes 
one's credulity heavily. Then if the second man 
gained his by usury, why did not his pound gain 
ten pounds instead of ^Ye ? He had the same 
capital and the same time. 

The Lord commanded the third man, as he did 
the others, to trade with his capital; why does he 
now ]3unish him for not putting it out to usury? 

After all, his punishment must have been hardly 
worth naming because of its brief duration, for he 
was already over a hundred years old. 

In Matthew, the man who gained five talents, 
gained them by working with them; so also did 
the second. On what principle did the Lord con- 
demn the third as lazy, if all that was required was 
to hand it over to some usurer ? This is just the 
way lazy men do now with the Lord's money. 



USUEY. 155 

Such a tiling as a bank in our sense of the term, 
had no existence at that time. The words ren- 
dered "bank" and "exchangers" are in the Greek 
the same word. It means three-footed, and is a 
common word for table. It is an expression for 
business of various kinds. The apostles said that 
it was not meet for them to leave the service of 
God "to serve tables," meaning to oversee the dis- 
tribution of what was given to the poor of the 
church. The word rendered "usury" means that 
which is begotten, offspring. That it is the com- 
mon word for usury is admitted. That it may 
mean increase that is secured by using labor in 
connection with capital, as the increase was 
secured in the case of the ten and ^Ye pounds and 
the five and two talents, I think must be admitted. 

The latter explanation makes the whole story 
in both cases consistent and reasonable. To insist 
that it means usury involves all the absurdities 
above described. 

Observe the use made of the pounds and talents 
gained. The Lord appears not to have put them in 
his own strong box, nor to have himself put them 
out at usury, nor to have set these servants up in 
the banking business on a large scale. The servant 
that had the ten talents, five of which he had 
gained by work, was allowed to keep them all and 
was given the one talent of the slothful servant 
and he besides was rewarded with the rule over 
"many things," and the man who had gained by 



156 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

work, ten pounds, received as a gift tlie one pound 
and was made ruler over ten cities. 

In view of the fact that God, three times, by the 
hands of His servants, swore His people not to 
take usury, punished them with death and cap- 
tivity as he had threatened, because they did take 
it, is it reasonable to believe that He thus 
rewarded these servants because they did practice 
it, and that He severely punished two of their 
number because they did not practice it ? 

We have now completed the Bible argument 
against usury. The person who shall find a ma- 
terial error and shall inform me of the same, will 
put me under great obligation to him. 

The subject is one of the very last importance 
and one on which no one can afford to be in error. 

God's favor is better for any man than all 
earthly possessions. 

USURY CONDEMNED BY REASON. 

Adam Smith, and all economists after him, agiee 
that what a man earns is his proper wages. 

Statistics show that one-half, and probably 
more of the present earnings of labor goes to pay 
usury that nobody earns. 

To speak of money earning, or, as Shakspeare 
has it, the "barren breed of metal" producing, is 
to talk nonsense. But has not past labor, as it is 
called, or capital, a right to a share in the proceeds 
of labor? There is where we join issue and say, 



USUET. 157 

in the form of money, it never has any such rights 
except in the case of partnership, where the 
parties divide the risk. There is a distinction, too 
often overlooked between the capitalist and the 
employer or business manager. The latter from 
the responsible and extremely valuable kind of 
labor he performs and the risk he must run, is 
justly entitled to much larger wages than other 
laborers, but beyond pay for wear and tear of 
buildings and machinery, and necessary expenses 
of insurance, if he has any, and of taxes of 
various kinds, with something added for risk, he 
has no right to compensation for use of capital. 
Laborers, forgetting this distinction between em- 
ployer and capitalist, often blame the wrong man, 
and the poor employer, between the blind fury of 
the laborer, and grinding avarice of the usurer, 
is the most oppressed man in the community. 

But men will not loan anything else for no com- 
pensation; why should they loan money ? Money 
is not property in the ordinary sense, but the legal 
instrument for the exchange of property. The law 
of its creation only contemplates it in that light. 
The holder of it has that which will procure for 
him, in consequence of this legal power, anything 
else he may desire, and with which, if he hoards up 
a sufficient amount, he can take all he pleases of 
every other kind of property at his own price, since 
the quantity of money in circulation fixes the price 
of all kinds of property. The design of money 



158 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PEEVENTION. 

and the good of community wliose united will 
gives this power does not contemplate men's hoard- 
ing money. When men turn all their other prop- 
erty into money and let it out on usury, they in a 
sense hoard it, instead of spending it as the very 
institution of money contemplates, and as the good 
of community requires. They use a power given 
by community, the benfitsof which beyond simple 
use as Gladstone says, belongs to community, to 
amass fortunes for themselves at other people's 
expense. No other kind of property has such 
power. Piling up other property except land 
titles, which we shall discuss hereafter, does not 
effect the value of other property, or even enable 
the holders to get what they please for that partic- 
ular kind, unless they can create a monopoly. 

Money spent is free to fulfill the design of its 
creation. Money put out at interest is hoarded, 
and yet used to get something for nothing. If one 
buys a horse he must also buy harness, wagon, 
various tools or implements; must build a barn, 
procure food and expend labor on him to get any 
good of his money. In addition to all this, to be sure 
to get his money out of him or them, he must pay 
somebody for insuring them. He can't get them 
insured for what they cost and is liable to lose all 
at any moment. If he lends either or all of them 
or any kind of property except money, he ought 
to get hire for them, which will not be usury if the 
charge be not too great, but will be pay back for 



USUEY. 159 

the money pnt into them. The exception to this 
is where things are returned in kind, as " victuals." 

The usurer requires that his money be insured 
to several times the amount of the principal and 
interest, and that the man who thus insures his 
money, pay him a heavy compensation every 
year besides. 

The fact that usurers collectively must be paid 
an enormous amount of money every year, while 
they hold in their hands the power of fixing the 
prices of all commodities, works unutterable op- 
pression in the country. There can be no such 
thing as a normal price of commodities where mar- 
kets are always glutted with all kinds of property 
required to be sold at any price they will bring to 
pay usury. No amount of protection ever has 
saved or can save such a people from poverty and 
the less amount of money usurers allow to circulate 
the greater the distress, and the more certain and 
rapid the ruin and destruction. This is the ver- 
dict of history as well as the deduction of reason. 

In Greece, in the time of golon, (Smith's Greece, 
chapter ten, pages eleven and twelve), through 
the means of usury the poor had lost all their 
property, and in many cases were held as actual 
slaves by the rich. By his celebrated law, called 
Seisachtheia, or shaking off of burdens, he can- 
celled all contracts by which lands or persons had 
become obligated for debts, and thus prevented an 
actual uprising of the poor against their oppressors. 



160 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PEEVENTION. 

He gave still farther relief to all classes except 
the bondholder class, by lessening by fiat the 
value of money something over one-fourth, a meas- 
ure which, like many others of like character in 
the history of nations, ancient and modern, did not 
have to be undone. 

Tacitus, Annals Book 6, chapters sixteen and 
seventeen, says: 

" Usury was, in truth, an inveterate evil in Eome, 
and the cause of ever-recurring discord and sedi- 
tions. * * * Afterwards, by a regulation o£ 
the tribunes, it was reduced to one-half, and at 
last usury was forbidden." It was afterwards 
restored, and was one of the causes of the nation's 
downfall. Usurers called in their debts, and 
hoarded their money, causing great distress, but 
finally the " emperor brought relief by placing a 
sum of a hundred thousand great sesterces " where 
it could be borrowed without interest by giving 
landed security to the people to double the value 
of money loaned. 

" When usurers found they could not have their 
own way, they, too, were glad to lend their money 
without usury." 

Without doubt such would be tJie case every- 
where were usury abolished. Even without usury 
the money-lender would have a very great advan- 
tage over other property-holders. The very fact 
that he could claim his dues which are the whole 
amount of his property in money, while all other 



USUEY. 161 

property was liable to sudden depreciation in 
money value, would be a great advantage given to 
him, not by his property as property, but by com- 
munity at its own risk. The Eoman law at one 
time required all money loaners to invest in 
other property three-fourths of their money. As 
money was a creation of government it certainly 
had such right over its own creature. The effect 
of such law was to pour out the hoards and set 
money free, so that it could accomplish the design 
of its creation, effect exchanges. The government 
that secures the actual freedom and independence 
and equality of its subjects, will strictly forbid 
all money-lending whether for usury or not. 

We learn from Cicero that usury and debt 
were the principal causes of the conspiracy of 
Cataline. 

Tacitus says in his Germania that usury was 
unknown among the Germans, and that that other 
law of God against land monopoly prevailed, land 
being a common possession. He says that the 
Eomans had fought with these free Germans for 
over 240 years, and had never finally conquered 
them; that they had been a greater barrier to 
Koman ambition than all the kingly governments 
of the East. 

Let the shoddy aristocrats of the country, who 
are now longing for a strong government as they 
phrase it, and a standing army to protect them 
u 



162 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

and their ill-gotten gains from their fellows 
whom they have robbed, make a note of this. The 
strongest government in the world is that of a 
free people protected in their lives and means of 
properly sustaining life. The government that 
properly does these things may safely reckon 
upon an earthly immortality, as it will have the 
favor of God and man. 

Usury was first legalized by English law under 
that cruel monster and wife-murderer, Henry YIIL, 
all the English bishops signing a protest against it 
as a violation of God's law. 

But men who borrow to make money ought to 
pay interest. 

Statistics show that not more than five per cent, 
of merchants make what the world calls a suc- 
cess. Most of them, if they do not begin on 
borrowed capital, find themselves driven by cir- 
cumstances that they cannot control, to borrow. A 
series of years of falling prices caused by a 
money stringency compels them to pay usury, to 
meet which they must sell at a loss. 

The burden often groivs rapidly heavier and the 
means of throwing it off become constantly less. 
But for the fast accumulating interest they might 
manage to pay the principal, but as it is, they fail, 
and the usurer gathers up what he can of the 
fragments, and the poor men are turned out, 
ruined in property, in reputation, often in health, 
to meet the taunts and jeers of the careless, 



USURY. 163 

unthinking mass, including Christians, and even 
ministers, who say that he lacked capacity to man- 
age business affairs. What wonder that he turns 
to the cup of forgetfulness to drown his sorrows. 

But for usury ten business men would probably 
succeed where one does now, and the saving to 
the community would be many times the gain of 
the usurer. 

The comparatively few business men who gain 
by usury do so at a vast expense to the com- 
munity. They either have some monopoly, or are 
in some way expert gamblers in something. 
Under the present circumstances very few men 
who are following legitimate callings can long pay 
usury. 

Edward Kellogg, in " Capital and Labor," shows, 
by actual figures, that if two mechanics just of age 
should, by denying themselves families, manage to 
save $1 per day each for forty years and four months, 
and should loan that sum at seven per cent, per 
annum, interest paid half yearly and reloaned, and 
should at that period cease to labor, but should 
for twenty years and two months longer collect 
and reloan their interest, after allowing $15,00.80 
for their support during the time they did not 
labor, they would have a fortune of 1500,000. 

They had actually earned besides expenses while 
they labored $24,200, This sum during the forty 
years in which they labored, beginning with 
nothing, and during twenty years and two months 



164 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PBEVENTION. 

afterwards, had earned, as men say, besides their 
support, the vast sum of half a million. The 
fact is $475,800 of that sum was earned by other 
people and given to these men. Even more than 
that; the men who earned the money had insured 
this vast sum during all the time, themselves suf- 
fering all loss from tornadoes, bad crops, money 
panics and the numerous contingencies that affect 
money values. At seven per cent, the annual 
interest at the close of the period is $35,000, or 
$10,800 more than they earned above expenses in 
the whole forty years and four months. 

If the interest had been one per cent., their 
whole fortune would have been, after allowing for 
their support for twenty years and two months, 
$21,343 and the annual interest $213.44. 

Is anybody prepared to maintain that the 
earnings of a man's lifetime, at ordinary wages, 
for skilled labor, can earn during his lifetime over 
twenty-one times as much as the man himself? If 
he cannot he must give up interest as unjust. 
Here is no speculation, only he ordinary rate of 
interest. 

We maintain that usury is unjust, and must be 
entirely forbidden for the following reasons : 

1st. That God forbids it, and He will destroy 
the nation and punish the men that practice it. 

2d. It is unjust because it gives to individuals 
most of the benefits that arise from an instrument 
designed for the common good. 



USURY. 165 

3d. It imposes all the risks incident upon the 
property relations and production upon other kinds 
of property 

4th. It amasses vast amounts of money in 
banks and the hands of usurers, and thus by con- 
tracting the currency, lessens the price of all prop- 
erty and allows the usurer to take what he pleases. 

5th. It imposes upon the rest of society the 
burden of sustaining the value of the money in- 
sured. 

6th, It discourages the true economy of earn- 
ing and spending for the common good, and en- 
courages the false one of saving and lending to 
support future idleness. 

7th. It robs labor of its just earnings to pay 
vast amounts that were never earned. 

8th. It charges for the use of that so far as the 
original intent of which is concerned, was never 
used but returned in full. 

9th. It exacts pay for that that already has 
received payment in full for all just demands. 

10th. It fattens on the ruin caused by money 
famine, and has no sympathy with measures for 
monetary relief. 

11th. It destroys existing industries needed to 
sustain the present army of laborers, and deters 
men from assuming the risk of starting new ones 
required to feed the coming millions. 

12th. It always creates two classes; the one 



166 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

very rich, the other very poor, and' in so doing 
morally corrupts them both. 

Bonds and usury mean bondage and slavery. 
God's word is ever thundering, " Break every yoke 
and let the oppressed go free." 

Ten of the above propositions vary only slightly 
from those in *' Studies in Justice," by Eev. A. 
J. Chittenden. 



CHAPTEE XIV. 

ENDOWMENT. 

We have seen that God's law condemns under 
all circumstances and for all times, the practice of 
usury. Whatever exception there was to this was 
temporary and was repealed or rather expired by 
its own limitation, when the partition wall between 
Jew and Gentile was broken down. 

In His law God made provision, abundant and 
adequate to the needs of Christian education, for 
all time. In all the tribes cities were given to the 
priests, the Levites, which with their suburbs were 
to be their inheritance forever. 

He further provided that all His people should 
pay every year one-ten fch of all their income, be- 
sides free will offerings to sustain His service and 
the teachers He had provided. 

If our educational institutions are, as we call 
them, Christian, they must be supported in this 
way. You will see men who insist that everything 
about religion must be done according to the Bible, 
who yet, in the most important of all matters in 
order to correct ideas about religion — teaching it, 
readily forsake God's method, adopt worldly meth- 
ods and use worldly expedients. 

167 



168 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

Worldly expedients are based upon tlie wisdom 
of this world, which often is directly opposed to 
the law of God. If we have given a correct view 
of usury as it is related to God's law, and we 
think we have, our professedly Christian colleges 
and seminaries for the training of Christian 
teachers, are supported not in God's way, but in a 
way sometimes expressly forbidden by human law, 
even in heathen countries, as unjust. May not this 
be the reason why even now the experienced ear of 
such statesmen as John Bright can hear the 
muffled drum and measured tread of freedom's 
advancing hosts, coming to hurl tyrants from their 
thrones and let the oppressed go free? 

The report of the Commissioner of Education 
for 1883-4, shows that from productive funds, most 
of which was probably usury, the 370 colleges of 
this country realized for that year $3,018,624, 
which was about $1,000,000 more than they re- 
ceived from tuition. The army of 4,644 instruct- 
ors, who are comfortably fed on the proceeds of 
usury, taking human nature as it is, can hardly be 
expected, and in most cases would not be allowed, 
to teach the truth on that subject. 

Ordinarily, these men write the text-books not 
only for the colleges, but for the lower grades of 
schools, and if they do not defend, which they 
usually do, the practices that furnish their bread, 
they do not teach, if they know it, their real 
character. 



ENDOWMENT. 169 

Teachers supported in God's way are free to 
teach the truth; teachers supported in ways of 
men's devising are tempted, if not forced, to teach 
what men approve. 

Even silence teaches in this case. He that 
silently accepts the fruit of usury is a usurer, more 
or less guilty in proportion to his knowledge. 

This is the devil's great device to get the aid of 
good men to help on his schemes for the ruin of 
the human race. It looks so plausible. Is it not 
a good thing for a minister who has only a small 
salary and a large family, to have a few hundreds 
or thousands of dollars on which he may draw 
yearly revenue for his support? 

He had better, after using what he has, trust 
God to supply his remaining needs, than defy 
God's power and trample under foot His law, to 
get what God and human reason say does not be- 
long to him. 

Error always sooner or later brings ruin and 
trouble. The troubles and commotions which 
everywhere prevail, causing the stoutest hearts to 
quail, are proof positive that there has been false 
teaching in our institutions of learning. Men will 
yet learn that when they violate God's law in eco- 
nomics as in physics, they must suffer as the re- 
sult. If only those suffered that sinned, the fate 
of mortals would seem more tolerable. Often the 
man whose sin is the greatest seems to suffer the 
least in this life. If we could see as God sees, it 



170 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

migM be plain to us tliat even in the liell of lust 
and crime tliat the immortal Stead laid open to 
the horrified gaze of Christendom, the lot of the 
child victim was happiness itself compared with 
that of her tormentor whom usury or some other 
form of injustice enabled to live in idleness and 
wallow in lust and crime. 

Colleges that are supported by a plain and pal- 
pable violation of God's law have little claim to be 
considered Christian. For the time being, if their 
officers are Christian men, they may help the 
cause of Christ. God blesses the honest and ear- 
nest even though they be, ignorantly, in error; but 
their works are not perfect and if saved at all, 
they will "be saved so as by fire." 

Aside from violation of God's law, are other 
reasons why a college should not live upon usury. 

A college fully endowed and run, as many are, 
by a closed board, is entirely independent of the 
Christian church or the public sentiment of its 
time. Men, even Christian men sometimes, change 
their views, and men once elected are sometimes 
not found to be what they were supposed to be. 

Getting influence over others it is found diffi- 
cult or impossible to get them out of college 
boards. Thus it comes to pass that a college en- 
tirely changes its character and teaches what the 
man who furnished its funds did not believe and 
would be very sorry to have taught. Almost inva- 
riably the class of persons sought to be benefitted 



ENDOWMENT. 1*^1 

in the founding of a college or school are in 
course of time cheated out of their rights and in 
some way excluded from the privileges sought to 
be secured to them. 

If the descendants of the men who contributed 
their peck of corn per week to the first college 
planted in our country, are in the same circum- 
stances as their ancestors were, the hand of char- 
ity alone can help them to reap any benefit from 
this tree of their poor ancestors' planting. 

Steadily as her vast endowments have piled up, 
has the son of the poor man lost power to reap ad- 
vantage from them. Perhaps it is well that it is so. 
The professed Christianity taught there would 
cause his pious ancestor's bones to rattle in the 
coffin if they could hear it, and the morality and 
political economy is not much better. 

England's seven great public schools, as they are 
called, were established and endowed to teach her 
poor, but free, people of the several localities 
where they were planted. Now a head master on 
a liberal salary of several thousand pounds, aided 
by well paid assistants, thumps learning into the 
skulls of lords in miniature, and noble earls and 
counts, and sons of merchant princes and gree.t 
landlords, and lazy usurers, but no son of a poor 
man ever looks into these stolen precincts, except 
as a menial. When will the Master again return 
to this sin-cursed earth and drive out the shame- 
less rich robbers who have stolen the green earth 



172 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PEEVENTION. 

that God gave to man, and even the choicest bless- 
ings that men have sought to secure to their less 
favored fellows ? 

The universities of Germany were planted as 
Christian institutions, but have mostly become 
infidel. 

History shows that the only way to keep insti- 
tutions pure is to keep them dependent. If a 
man wants to give to a college for the purpose of 
having his principles or religion taught, he ought 
to require that his gift be not kept at interest, but 
used for teaching purposes within a limited time. 
In this way he not only can provide to have his 
views taught, but he is free from the sin of 
tempting or of requiring men to violate God's 
law. 

The present system not only requires men to 
sin against God by taking usury, but it sometimes 
requires them in other ways to wrong men. 

Colleges with many thousands of dollars tied up 
as endowment, employ teachers at low salaries and 
because they cannot get means to meet their claims 
make them wait even though they must pay inter- 
est to live, or even give up part of their earnings 
altogether. 

Let Christians again be taught to obey God's 
law that requires them to tithe their income for 
His cause, including support of Christian schools, 
and there will be no more occasion for endowments. 
When men are again taught to obey God's law 



ENDOWMENT. 173 

the rage for all kinds of insurance will cease. A 
life of obedience will insure a life of trust, free 
from all unseemly haste to get rich because we are 
afraid to trust God's care for us, and free from all 
shams and shoddies. The question "When the 
son of man cometh shall He find faith on the 
earth" ought to ring in the ears of every Christian 
until it burns a life of perfect holy trust into his 
very soul. The man that does not trust God for 
this life may possibly be saved " so as by fire" but, 
in that higher, more noble sense that makes men 
free, he cannot be said to have faith. 

By a sublime faith for himself and for his work 
Mr. Moody has been enabled to do about as much 
effective service in bringing men to Christ as a 
generation of college and seminary men who have 
been fed by endowments, but now, if he is rightly 
reported, he is seeking to provide that not by God's 
care of them, but thanks to Brother Moody's 
forethought and kindness, somebody may take up 
his labors and carry on the work he has begun. 
Poor man! the adversary has at last stolen a 
march on him, and though he could not get a 
chance to furnish him food and shelter, or personal 
aid while he is living, he is buying him with a 
grave-stone. Thou foul spirit of evil! couldstthou 
not have left one human life besides the Master's 
free from thy dirty finger marks ? It must forever 
be true that no man save one can say truly, " Satan 
cometh and hath nothing in me," 



174 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

St. Paul everywhere among tlie Gentiles made 
collections of money, not for some great endow- 
ment so that they might not have to trust God 
while they taught this new Gospel, but to relieve 
the poor widows and orphans, made poor, doubt- 
less, by the Scribes, Pharisees and lawyers, who 
probably, by usury, "devoured widows' houses, and 
for a pretense made long prayers." It did not seem 
good to him to hand it over to bankers or shyster 
lawyers to be let for nineteen per cent., as some 
college graduates, who profess to be Christians, 
are now doing, justifying themselves, doubtless, by 
the thought that Alma Mater does the same thing, 
true, at a somewhat smaller figure, but then the 
principle is the same, and they only get the same 
as Chicago banks. The Scriptures contain no war- 
rant for endowment, and they expressly tell us that 
Satan is the prince of this world and we ought 
naturally to expect that when he helps us he will 
only help us into sin. 

When we forsake God's way we are apt to " hew 
out for ourselves broken cisterns that can hold no 
water." God's law is vocal with denunciations of 
usury and extortion, but the Christian that pre- 
sumes to talk in the same way is indeed a speckled 
bird, a croaker, a crank and crazy. 

Said the Saviour: " When I sent you forth with- 
out purse, or scrip, or shoes, lacked ye anything?" 
and they answered: "Nothing." If we were to 
grant that all endowments of Protestant institu- 



ENDOWMENT. 175 

tions are used to make men wiser, better Chris- 
tians, which no one will claim, it yet remains true 
that even in Protestant countries the Papal power 
is heaping up vast endowments that are free from 
taxation and subject to one will, and that, alien to 
our country and its institutions, the income of 
which is used not to enlighten the masses and 
make them better citizens, but to propagate and 
sustain in our country this foreign rule. 

In Mexico, under Catholic rule, those endow- 
ments had to be confiscated in order to make room 
for any degree of liberty to men. In Catholic 
France, so burdensome had they become that the 
terrible revolution of 1793 was in part a rebellion 
against them and resulted in their abolition. All, 
or at least most of these, were given by sincere 
and pious men who hoped to promote the cause of 
God and righteousness in the earth. 

Obedience to God's law only can promote God's 
truth and the real good of men. 

Base the educational institutions of a people on 
false principles and you put out their eyes and 
make it certain that they will experience terrible 
sufferings. 

Many colleges are very much crippled for want 
of means to do their work in the present, and 
their present usefulness is very much curtailed in 
order to save means for the future, when, if the 
present were well provided for, there would be 
much greater promise for the future, which would 



176 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PEEVENTION. 

be far more able to take care of itself than tinder 
the present arrangement. I think the future can 
be trusted to provide for institutions if they de- 
serve its care, without taxing the poverty of the 
present, and that the institutions for which it has 
to pay will be all the more appreciated and cher- 
ished by it. We see, both from reason and from the 
law of God, that great endowments kept at usury 
are wrong. 



CHAPTEE XV. 

LAND TENUEE. 

The more careful our search the more evident 
does it become that disregard of God's law is at 
the bottom of all injustice and wrong among men. 
We have seen the ruin that violation of the law 
against usury brought to the Jews and to every 
nation since. We propose now to examine the 
provisions of God's law with regard to land 
tenure. In Leviticus 25 : 23 we have the law as 
follows: 

" The land shall not be sold forever; for the 
land is mine, for ye are are strangers and sojourn- 
ers with me." Every Jew and every proselyte had 
an inalienable right to the land, not in fee simple, 
but in use. If he wanted to go into business, and 
sold his land to get money to speculate on, it could 
not be sold so that it would not come back to him at 
the great jubilee. If he changed his mind and 
wished it back before the jubilee, or if he had kin 
that wished to do so, the land could be redeemed 
at any time by paying back the purchase money 
for the time yet left till the jubilee without 
interest. If God owned the soil then, he owns it 
now. There has been no time since when he has 

12 177 



178 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION, 

abdicated his throne or yielded his right to men. 
All the right that men have to sell land is a stolen 
right, but a stolen title never becomes anything 
else than a stolen title, and never can give any real 
right of ownership. 

When our Saxon ancestor became a man and 
took a wife he had assigned to him his house plat 
and his seed plat of land. Whatever happened 
he had within his reach the means of sustaining 
life. He had an equal right to a share in the great 
field which the villagers cultivated in common, 
could take wood or game from the common 
forests or fish from the Almighty's rivers, in fact, 
was a free man, as God designed men to be. 

Since land-grabbing tyrants have stolen his 
birthright, his free-born English descendant is a 
slave, and is obliged to call the noble descendant 
of the royal favorite, to whom William the Con- 
queror, or some earlier or later kingly plunderer, 
gave what he had stolen from the industrious poor, 
master. God, in His word says: "Call no man 
master upon the earth," yet the injustice of men 
has brought it to pass that in this country a 
rapidly increasing number of men must look 
upon others as their masters, and call them by 
that name that grates harshly upon free men's 
ears. It is idle to object to the title where the 
reality exists. Men cut off from an inheritance 
in their country^s soil can only live by the per- 
mission of other men who are their masters* 
Sovereignty goes with the soil. 



LAND TENURE. 179 

Let US take a glance at the servile condition of 
the descendants of our free Anglo-Saxon and early 
English ancestors. Take a few recent examples 
from " Bread Winners Abroad," by E. P. Porter, 
December, 1885. 

The "local god almighty" of the city of 
Sheffield, who claims, by a title stolen from the 
ancestors of the present generation of toilers in 
that busy city, the right to tax them for the right 
to live on a little patch of God's land, draws annu- 
ally $1,400,000, in rents for miserable stys, half of 
them not fit for human habitation. 

The great incubus upon the shoulders of the 
newer and more prosperous city of Cardiff is 
Lord Bute, who for the use of somewhat better 
quarters, draws every year $1,500,000 from the 
toilers of that city. 

Of the actual wealth producers the condition is 
as follows: 

William Portor, laborer, in Leeds, one of the 
most properous parts of England, has a wife and 
one child, gets 18s. per week, pay 83 cents rent 
out of less than $450. This is the ordinary wages 
for common labor. 

Mr, Wealthy testifies that he has been inspector 
for fifteen years; his jurisdiction extending over 
three hundred and twenty thousand inhabitants : 
In all that time he has not known a single laborer, 
including skilled mechanics who owned the house 
he lived in and the ground on which it stood. In 



180 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PKEVENTION. 

Coatbridge, the center of the iron region of Scot- 
land $10,000,000 are paid in wages, $2,000,000, or 
one-fifth the whole is paid for rent. 

A woman and her daughter of sixteen, after six 
days work, late and early at the anvil in making 
nails and the "oliver," a heavy machine for 
making bolts, carried their week's work six miles 
and when the product of their labor was weighed 
received for their week's hard work $2.16, out of 
which must come at least one shilling for fire, 
carriage and wear of tools besides rent. In answer 
to the question how they lived they said "We don't 
live; we hardly exist." Hundreds of women work 
in the smithies and their earnings do not exceed 
$1.25 per week. 

Among the silk weavers the father of four 
childern said, by "working twelve to fourteen 
hours I may make sixty cents per day. I don't 
believe I made more than $96 last year. Live, 
sir? We don't live — we just muddle to keep off 
dying." 

But benevolent England is ever ready to assist 
her industrious poor. Hear this white slave's 
pitiful story on this point. 

"Well, yes sir, I own I was once driven to 
apply to the parish, and I was blackguarded as if I 
had robbed a church. It was to bury the poor 
child. How was I to raise X2 ; so I went to the 
parish. I happened to go in a coat that a lady 
gave me- — there it hangs. If she hadn't given it 



LAND TENURE. 181 

to me I shouldn't have had a coat at all; and 
because I'd a coat on they said that such a gentle- 
man as me ought to be ashamed of himselt to 
come begging." 

Land in England became the possession of the 
very few not only by direct stealing as we have 
said but, as we have seen, by the operation of 
usury and sale both of which are directly and 
pointedly forbidden by God and in their necessary 
working must produce just the inequality of 
human condition that we see in England and 
which is rapidly coming to exist in this country. 

As we saw that money was not like other 
property produced by nature along with or inde- 
pendent of the labor of man, but was a creation 
of law designed by the law of its being — not to be 
hoarded, or, what amounted to the same thing, to 
be loaned to be paid again in money, so we see 
that land is not like other property that men create 
by labor either in connection with nature or with- 
out her aid, but is purely a part of nature — a 
creation of God. 

What man creates either in conjunction with 
nature or apart from her operations, he has a right 
to against the world. That which is purely a force 
or creation of nature or nature's God he can never 
rightfully appropriate beyond what is needful io 
support his own physical nature. If twenty 
horses were turned into a pasture large enough to 
keep them all in good condition and one of them, 



182 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

by his greater strength and cunning, should 
monopolize the whole pasture and starve the 
nineteen to death he would do just as men do and 
his conduct would be no more unreasonable or 
unjust, in fact would not be unjust at all, while 
man's is in the highest degree unjust and impious 
besides. 

The idea that absolute ownership of land is nec- 
essary to the highest use and improvement is dis- 
proved by the experience of far more than half the 
human race, including the owners of much of the 
most valuable land in our largest cities where pal- 
atial buildings are erected on leased land. If men 
absolutely owned all the improvements they put 
upon land and no other men owned the land, they 
would be far more secure than such lessees. As 
in the case of money loaned, interest or usury is a 
means of getting something for nothing, so private 
property in land is sometimes a much greater 
means to the same end. A man secures vacant 
lots in a city or unoccupied tracts of farm land at 
a low price; other people around these lands ex- 
pend their money in making improvements. Land 
rises in value, and this man who has not contrib- 
uted a dollar to the improvement of the country 
reaps enormous profits, not one dollar of which is 
rightfully his, but belongs to the community whose 
improvements have caused the rise, or rather to 
the community as a whole. This unearned, 
wrongfully appropriated rise of value is taken 



LAND TENURE. 18B 

from the poor, as is usury, and given to the rich. 
If land had no cash value and men like other an- 
imals were not allowed to appropriate more than 
they could use, or than their physical wants re- 
quired, when a poor man wanted a house he could 
build one without having to expend enough to 
build one, and perhaps several houses, for a place 
to set it. Often a man has enough to build a 
house but has to pay it all for a lot. He builds 
his house by mortgaging both house and lot to 
some usurer, struggles for years to pay off the 
mortgage to see all at last engulfed in the capa- 
cious maw that is never filled. 

The land grabber and the usurer^ when not the 
same man^ often hunt together. These are the 
two principal ways men have devised to escape the 
fiat of the Creator who said: " In the sweat of thy 
brow shalt thou eat bread." 

God's law is against them both, and the decree 
has gone forth that " every plant which my Heav- 
enly Father hath not planted shall be rooted up." 
In spite of all misleading census tables, just as 
there is an irresistible tendency to run out all 
small traders and reduce them to the condition of 
clerks and laborers for the large ones, or the great 
corporations, so there is an irresistible tendency to 
run out all small farmers that work their own land 
and make the small farmers hired laborers of the 
large ones and the great companies. Every inven- 
tion of labor-saving machinery seems to accelerate 



184 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PKEVENTION. 

the process. The process of treaking down inde- 
pendence does not stop with making an operative 
out of an independent worker; it breaks down the 
man in both soul and body, so that the bold, free 
man that the state and the church need for their 
support has become a timid, cowering slave, who 
trembles at the eye of a master. 

In all kinds of slavery the tendency is to reduce 
the wages to the point at which the slave can 
barely live and work. Then when the needs or 
the pleasure of the master class do not require 
them to furnish labor enough for all, part must lie 
idle part or all the time, or must beg, or steal, or 
tramp. Pliny says the " latifundia perdidere Ital- 
iamJ' The broad estates ruined Italy — Eome. 
Horace, in pathetic song, describes the process. 
He says the olive gardens, productive to their for- 
mer owners, were giving way to the broad fish 
ponds and extensive parks and flower gardens of 
rich usurers and land owners. We live in the age 
of steam and electricity, and hence our descent to 
national ruin is rapid as compared with the slow 
locomotion of ancient Eome. 

To accelerate the process, our law-makers have 
invented legal individuals that have no souls, as if 
a usurer, or a land grabber were not unfeeling 
enough to answer their purposes of destruction. 

We have reduced men to mere parts of a ma- 
chine, and where God planted a man with feet 
upon the solid earth, we have made a thing occu- 
pying a flat or an attic. 



LAND TENURE. 



185 



The only way to undo this horrible piece of work 
is to proclaim a jubilee and restore the land that 
has been stolen, and cease to eat by usury. ^ 

Probably the best way to accomplish this is to 
forever cease from usury and cease to rob the poor 
by indirect taxation that makes them pay far more 
than their just share of the common expenses, 
and levy all taxes for all purposes upon land. This 
would make it unprofitable for mere speculators 
and money kings to hold land in large amounts, 
and the actual users of land being relieved from a 
heavy tax they now pay almost without knowing 
it, would find their actual taxes even less than at 
present, and their ability to get lands for them- 
selves and their children very greatly increased. 

The very rise of land values has a tendency to 
extinguish the small farmer. As the price of land 
goes up the poor man finds it impossible to increase 
the size of his farm to provide homes for his fam- 
ily or compete with the bonanza farmer who does 
everything by machinery, so he sells out to the 
rich, who prefer land investments, because they 
are more secure than others, even though they 
may furnish less revenue, and, besides, large 
landed possessions add to a man's power and con- 
sequence in the community. The poor man for a 
time finds it more profitable to rent or move on 
where land is cheaper. When new lands are ex- 
hausted his descent to poverty will be much more 
rapid and inevitable. 



186 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PKEVENTION. 

If all taxes were put on land it would greatly 
simplify and cheapen the process of governing, as 
a great army of detectives and revenue officers 
could be dispensed with, which would greatly les- 
sen federal patronage and at the same time greatly 
diminish the number of criminals to be caught 
and punished. Smuggling is a crime that men, at 
least in the beginning, will engage in who would 
not steal or commit any other crime, hence it is a 
great demoralizer and incentive to crime. Trading 
in itself is no sin, and men come to feel that to 
forbid their trading on one side of a line is an 
infringement of their rights. In fact, such pro- 
hibition is never but partially enforced, which 
gives the law-breakers a great advantage over the 
law abiding part of the community. Land as a 
subject of taxation can never be smuggled or con- 
cealed, and will always pay the tax levied on it. 
Being the common gift of the Creator, it is but 
right that it pay the common expenses of society. 
Take away money's power to tax the producer and 
put all taxes on the forces of nature, then all the 
products of labor would be free. To tax the pro- 
ducts of labor is to discourage production. The 
products of land are more than the mere products 
of labor. The poor owner of a small farm is 
taxed now probably more than he would be if all 
taxes were put upon land, and the rise of land 
values with usury added, under the present sys- 
tem, did in England and will in this country, 



LAND TENCTRE. 187 

reduce liim in course of time to a farm laborer 
little or no better off than a slave. 

The limits of this chapter forbid a fuller discus- 
sion of the question here. The Creator^s command 
to "Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth 
and subdue it," is handicapped by the boundless 
greed of man. 

The right to live includes the right to a place in 
which to live. 

Man's right to life, which is set forth in our 
Declaration of Independence, will never be se- 
cured till, like our free English ancestry, every 
honest laboring man and woman has a home on 
the soil, forever secure against any intrusion 
of the usurer, or of any creditor or landlord. 

I do not say that the early English peasants 
had very many comforts that the laborer of the 
present sometimes has; I do say that he had 
the right to means of sustaining life that did not 
depend upon the mere pleasure of another, which 
the masses of to-day have not, and without which 
men are slaves either in the present or in pros- 
pect. As soon as a man opens his mouth for 
the rights of men he is assailed, often by men 
who themselves claim to be reformers, as a com- 
munist or one who proposes to make men equal 
in condition in spite of unequal abilities, to dis- 
courage the industrious and frugal and encourage 
the idle and indolent. 

All that any wise man contends for is that the 



188 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

laboring man should have just the chance to earn 
his bread that the Creator designed that he 
should have, and that the man who will not work, 
whether pauper or millionaire, shall not rob him 
of his honest earnings. 

In the early ages of her history, when Rome 
was all-conquering, her free citizens had equal right 
to lands, without purchase. When Germany, as 
Tacitus says, for 240 years resisted successfully 
the Homan arms, there was no such thing as pri- 
vate property in land. Every man, according to 
his rank, had his yearly allotment of land. Their 
money was cattle and sheep, and they did not even 
know anything about, much less practice, usury or 
taking interest. 

If all men's God given right to land were re- 
spected, it is evident that all labor troubles would 
at once and forever cease. 

If, when there failed to be employment so that 
laborers could live, they could turn to the cultiva- 
tion of the soil, vast areas of which in every coun- 
try either are not cultivated at all or are cultivated 
by men who really have no right to it, and no need 
for its productions, all men might live in comfort 
and happiness. 

Men could not suddenly amass vast fortunes 
and ought not to. 



CHAPTEEXVL . 

RAILROADS AND OTHER MONOPOLIES. 

Eailroads are so recent an invention that the 
great problems which they* present have not yet 
been fully solved. 

The countries of the old world except England, 
and even she in some of her colonial possessions, 
are working out the great questions under govern- 
ment ownership mainly, while England and the 
United States are doing the same by private cor- 
porations. 

Both methods are subject to drawbacks. The 
former from what seems to be the fact that govern- 
ments have not yet generally succeeded in carrying 
on most kinds of business as cheaply as private 
concerns. Selfishness seems to be a greater in- 
centive to the invention of labor-saving processes 
and to strict economy than patriotism. 

It may well be questioned whether some of the 
economies practiced by private concerns are not 
unjust and ought not to be tolerated. 

It appears by the last book on this question, 
" Eail Eoad Transportation " by Hadly, that, as a 
rule, passenger fares are considerably cheaper in. 
countries where the roads are under government 



189 



190 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PKEVENTION. 

ownership; that freight rates are considerably 
higher. Among what are classed as fixed charges, 
interest is the mill stone around the necks of all 
roads of both kinds. 

The above candid author, after a careful com- 
parison of the two methods inclines to private cor- 
porations as the best for a country. It appears to 
me that he has touched too lightly upon many of 
the abuses of private ownership. 

No country in which there is not a well estab- 
lished system of civil service is prepared to man- 
age successfully its own railroads. 

Where there is such system there can be no 
reason in the nature of things why government 
management ought not to succeed even better than 
private management. Eoads are now managed 
mostly by employes who have no motive to do well 
beyond the desire to keep their places. 

Among the abuses that make the present system 
oppressive and sometimes dangerous, are : Outrag- 
eous discriminations in favor of some individuals, 
which makes them dangerously rich, while break- 
ing down and ruining all others in the same line. 

Stock-watering, which is resorted to to evade 
laws that seek to prevent excessive profits, makes 
some men enormously rich. 

Bribery is freely resorted to in many and often 
exceedingly deceptive ways. Money, stocks, bonds, 
passes, land grants, attorneys' fees are among the 
ordinary means of securing valuable franchises 



RAILROADS AND OTHER MONOPOLIES. 191 

and exemption from the effects of salutary laws or 
to prevent the enactment of the same. The effect 
of snch things upon the morals of a community is a 
far greater calamity than all the thousands of mil- 
lions of dollars they steal in this way. Undermine 
the morals of a State and you render its downfall 
only a matter of time. Men who steal under the 
forms of law ought not to be greatly surprised if, 
following their example, others steal outside of 
such forms, and they come to be the sufferers. 

Great railroad corporations have usurped the 
governmental power of taxing the producers of 
"wealth to an extent that no government would ever 
dare to attempt. 

The U. S. Senate about 1874 appointed a special 
committee to investigate freight charges on farm 
products to the seaboard. In their report they 
said that the Western States were overcharged on 
transportation more than $300,000,000, which is 
nearly one-half as much as the whole amount of 
our foreign exports for 1886. , 

Recently the New York Legislature, by special 
committee, investigated the matter of rates on 
Western products. In their report they say that 
all charges for wheat or corn over 7 cents per 
bushel per thousand miles is extortionate. In the 
winter of 1882 hundreds of thousands of bushels 
were shipped from St. Louis, Mo., to Liverpool by 
way of New Orleans for less than nine cents per 
bushel. 



192 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PEEVENTION. 

Suppose now that a farmer in Lamar, Mo., 1500 
miles from New York, should raise on 160 acres of 
land the equivalent of forty bushels of corn per 
acre for ten years, or in all 64,000 bushels. The 
average price at Lamar was about twenty cents per 
bushel, or $12,800 for ten years. The average 
price in New York where prices are fixed for the 
whole country, was sixty cents per bushel. The 
actual cost of transportation according to the above 
authoritities was ten and one-half cents. Call it 
twenty cents to allow for handling and. ample pro- 
fits, and the producer was wronged out of just 100 
per cent, somewhere between Lamar and New York. 

If he had had the additional $1,280 per annumj 
that was his just due, it would have made all the^ 
difference to him between poverty and competence. 
Multiply this one case by the millions similarly 
situated and, where now are farms, stock, imple- 
ments, everything covered with the usurer's mort- 
gages, which in thousands of cases will ere long 
send the present holders, the actual owners being 
the usurers, tramping, you would see happy 
homes of freemen, beyond the reach of the usurer's 
bony hand. 

Wrong always reacts upon the wrong doer. When 
the extortion of the railroad and the greed of the 
usurer have changed these homes of independent 
farmers into quarters for poor tenants, they will 
have permanently destroyed or crippled their hope 
of future gains. Yastly less of merchandise, machin- 



EAILROADS AND OTHER MONOPOLIES. 193 

ery, stock, everything that a well-to-do people 
consume in vast quantities, and that constitute the 
security of the usurer, will be required in the 
country. Shallow political economists will cry 
"overproduction" and want more "protection 
against the pauper labor of Europe." Editors of 
so-called religious papers who know something 
about religion of some kind, but nothing about the 
causes that produce economic eiffects ; college pres- 
idents and officers and boards of trust, who are 
holding out their hands for donations to the men 
who are rich and increased in goods from the pro- 
ceeds of monopoly in its various forms, whether of 
money, transportation, corn or cotton, or coal or 
oil, or the thousand things men corner for gain ; 
doctors of divinity and ministers, often themselves 
educated by the so-called charity of men who have 
grown rich by plundering under the forms of law, 
who now seek to compound the matter with con- 
science by donating a part of their pelf to educate 
men to teach that their practices are right and con- 
sistent with love to God and man, all these, in ad- 
dition to the secular press and secular teachers of 
every kind, with some noble exceptions, who seldom 
or never have anything to say against the man who 
takes usury, however much he takes advantage of 
the necessities of his victim, who may be by pro- 
fession his brother Christian, censure and reproach 
the man who after struggling for years falls 
under his burden of debt that is always growing by 

13 



194 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PEEVENTION. 

usury. One would think from their talk that it 
was all right for men to lend money, but very 
wrong for others to borrow, unless they were rich 
enough not to need to do so at all. If it is wrong 
for poor people to borrow it must be wrong for 
rich people to lend to them. If poor people did 
not borrow the occupation of the usurer would 
speedily come to an end. 

But we are told that railroad stocks are owned 
as investments by a large number of poor people 
and often constitute the entire means of support of 
people who would otherwise be helpless. These 
are the "gnats" that the big spiders prey upon by 
the way of express or fast freight lines, sleeping 
car companies, dining car companies and other 
rings composed of large stockholders and high of- 
ficials which absorb the lion's share of a road's 
earnings, and deceive the public as to the real ex- 
tent of the extortion practiced upon them. • 

Such investors, instead of being benefited are 
usually in the end skinned out of the whole or a 
large part of their money invested. 

While on the cars in the State of Iowa I was 
obliged to listen to the conversation of a promin- 
ent railroad man and high bank official who de- 
scribed in glowing terms the way the banks, in- 
cluding his own, by means of similar inner rings 
of the principal officers, organized into a loan and 
trust company, whose officers being also the bank 
officers, borrowed most of the bank's money of 



BAILKOADS AND OTHER MONOPOLIES. 195 

themselves at a low rate of interest and re-let it to 
the dear public at a very high rate of interest, thus 
fleecing both the bank and the poor people who 
were stockholders, and the people that had to bor- 
row. The bank reports showed that their rate of 
interest was reasonable and the dividends to ordi- 
nary stockholders did not seem large and quid 
nuncs who never see below the surface could say 
banks are very reasonable in their charges and 
cannot be, as fanatics charge, great means of op- 
pression, but the poor people who were unmerci- 
fully skinned seldom are heard in the ordinary 
papers and their sufferings pass unnoticed and by 
the mass of men unknown. 

Railroads, telegraphs and telephones are not 
like ordinary private proper 1 5^, but are in their very 
nature public interests. No owner of other private 
property can have other men's property or that 
which belongs to the public condemned and take 
it for his own use. A public highway is opened 
and private property taken for it on the ground 
that it belongs to the public at large and on no 
other ground, and yet land belonging to a private 
owner is taken for a railroad and its owner is in- 
formed that the railroad is exclusively a private 
road, although it may damage his property far 
more than the public highway that generally runs 
on government lines. 

By private and corporate donations to build them 
and subsidies and land grants from government 



196 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

they have cost the country one way and another 
probably about as much as their present value. In 
steals of one kind and another the public are made 
to pay for them over again every few years, and 
yet they are exclusively owned by private com- 
panies. They buy legislatures, choose governors 
and judges, manage parties by means of political 
lawyers heavily salaried for that purpose and scofP 
at justice. 

If government is under obligation to protect the 
property interests of its subjects and in some cases 
even their lives it can not long choose but own the 
railroads and telegraph and telephone lines ; control 
in any other way is impossible. As in the case of 
the post office, government can mete out equal and 
exact justice to all without which it fails entirely 
to perform its proper functions. 

Some of the more obvious benefits of govern- 
ment control are: 

1. Freedom from the loss and danger to the 
public and to the employe, of strikes. 

2. Freedom from the great inconvenience and 
cost of transfers from one road to another. 

3. Greatly lessened expense for heavily salaried 
officers for so many different roads. Often these 
salaries are far higher than the salary of any gov- 
ernment officer except the President of the United 
States. 

4. Exemption from the loss and trouble of roads 
in bankruptcy. 



RAILROADS AND OTHER MONOPOLIES. 197 

5. If rightly managed, freedom from the load 
of usury that breaks down first the roads and then 
their patrons. 

6. Exemption from the moral corruption and 
material loss of stock-watering-, railroad-wrecking 
and the deadly influence of the vast fortunes thus 
obtained. 

7. Freedom from unjust discriminations that 
are fast increasing the numbers of the very rich 
and the very poor. 

8. Freedom from the deadly example of a power 
in the state that is above the state and that defies 
its laws and tramples them under its feet. 

To be free from all these the state and the cit- 
izen could afford to pay even more than the present 
high rates of transportation, but, in all probability 
would not have to pay more than half so much. 

According to Poor's "Manual of Eailroads" the 
average interest per mile of the 115,672 miles of 
railroad in operation in 1884 was $1,336.66, or in 
all, $154,614,135.52, which was more than half of 
the whole net gain of the roads for that year. 



CHAPTEE XVII. 

THE TEAMP. 

At the close of the great rebellion there was 
plenty of money and everybody was employed and 
happy. The times before the war had produced 
but very few rich men, and they had r.ot learned 
to act in unison for the oppression of others. 
Bankers had begun their combined operations, 
more or less secret, to promote the interests of 
their calling. They began through Congress to 
destroy all the money they did not own and could 
not control, and to give to the rich, home and 
foreign, the people's heritage; the unoccupied lands. 
Land monopoly and money monopoly have rapidly 
produced their legitimate and invariable results — , 
millionaires and tramps. 

Before the period of great national debts, 
governments kept rich men from amassing great 
amounts of money, and the poor were kept from 
tramping by still having some right to the soil by 
means of which they could get a subsistance, even 
though it was often meager and inadequate to their 
needs. Men shut away from access to the soil are 
absolutely dependent upon their fellows for life 
itself. When employment fails they have no 

198 



THE TRAMP. 199 

alternative but to tramp. Anyone, whose memory 
reaches back a score of years, can well remember 
that the first tramps were honest laboring men 
seeking employment. Men driven from home and 
the restraints of home life, and thrown into con- 
tact with others of their class with nothing to do, 
could not long remain innocent; smarting under 
an indefinable sense of wrong done them by 
society, soon becoming objects of suspicion, they 
naturally became more or less criminal. 

Tacitus says that idleness grows upon men so 
that what was at first forced inactivity becomes at 
length habit. When one's self-respect has been 
broken down and he has learned to live by prac- 
tices not entirely innocent, which do not involve 
work, we ought not to be surprised that he does 
not wish to work; it is plain that he is not wholly 
to blame for his condition. 

Newspapers that approve the sending of mission- 
aries to heathen of other races, far more debased 
than he, have advised feeding him arsenic. Is it on 
the principle that men commonly hate those whom 
they have injured ? Wrong done to others always 
returns to plague the wrong doers. Find fault as 
we may, the terrible tramp is upon us; he has 
tramped out, and goes on tramping out the sense 
of security enjoyed by dwellers in town and 
country alike. He has well-nigh tramped out that 
beautiful hospitality once habitual with us, so that 
we dare not use hospitality to strangers, and so 



200 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

fail of the privilege of "sometimes entertaining 
angels unawares/' and of obeying the scripture 
injunction. His heavy foot-fall has well-nigh 
smothered out our love for men, as men, and, I 
fear, has seriously impaired our love for their cre- 
ator. "If a man love not his brother whom he 
has seen, how can he love God whom he hath not 
seen ?" If history, as it is wont to do, repeats 
itself in our case, our posterity may find that the 
tramp has changed the whole aspect and customs 
of our country. 

Almost everywhere in the old world the peasant 
tillers of the soil live, not as our farmers, scattered 
over the country, but in villages, and have to go 
long distances to their daily toil. In the lands 
once trod by the feet of our Saviour and His 
apostles, life and liberty are in constant danger 
from roving bands of robbers, which are probably, 
the organized descendants of the individual tramps 
forced into being by ages of injustice and misrule. 

Chain gangs, prisons, even arsenic, cannot de- 
stroy the tramp; their only effect is to make him 
more terrible. When society becomes Christian, 
not nominal but real, after the pattern of the 
Nazarene, both the tramp and the millionaire will 
fade away in the advancing light of a real Christian 
civilization. 



CHAPTEK XVin. 

POVERTY, lEEELIGION, IMMOEALITY, DRUNKENNESS 

AND CRIME. 

Agnr's prayer, "give me neither poverty nor 
riches * * * lest I be full, and deny thee, and 
say: Who is the Lord ? Or lest I be poor and 
steal, and take the name of my God in vain," is 
one worthy a wise man. 

Kellogg, a New York merchant and bank presi- 
dent, in "Capital and Labor," says, that two and 
one-half per cent, of the population own one-half 
of all the property in the country. 

Observation, in every town, I think, will prove 
the statement true. These people, as a rule, are 
not more industrious than others, generally not 
more economical. Many of them have inherited 
large possessions, or secured some land or other 
monopoly, or have doubled up their hoards by 
usury. By unthinking persons they are pointed 
out as examples that all men may successfully 
emulate. To show the inconsequence of this logic, 
it is only necessary to remember that there are 
only two halves to any whole. If two and one- 
half per cent, more were as successful in getting 

201 



202 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

money as these, tlie other ninety-five per cent. 
must of necessity be paupers, or persons dependent 
upon these for their means of living. 

In the last twenty years in this country there 
have been on an average annually 6096 business 
failures. The average liabilities of these failures 
per annum have been $132,759,301, or for the 
twenty years $2,655,186,027. For the four years 
before the beginning of the contraction of the cur- 
rency which caused this terrible ruin and impov- 
erishment of men, the failures in the North aver- 
aged 544, and the average annual liabilities were 
$20,359,000. 

Each of the 112,232 failures within the last 
twenty years involved the ruin of a large number 
of men, many thousands of whom were heavy em- 
ployers of labor. 

By the special legislation in favor of the rich, 
many millions of well-to-do people have been re- 
duced to poverty. While it is true that the drink 
curse is doing the same thing for vast numbers it 
is only one of the causes that are working out the 
same evil results. , 

Stock and grain gambling, stock watering, rail- 
road wrecking, taking of usury, land grabbing and 
many other ways of appropriating what belongs 
to others are, in these times, common sources of 
poverty. 

It is high time that legislation now turn in favor 
of the poor. As honest Ben Wade said, "The 
rich can take care of themselves." 



IRRELIGION. 203 

Great riches and great poverty alike must be 
considered among the prime causes of irreligion. 
Whoever, then, wishes to promote the cause of true 
religion must seek to remove and prevent both 
these. 

When religion does not rebuke the grinding 
avarice that drives the laborer seven aays in the 
week for just enough to keep soul and body to- 
gether; that robs him by stock-watering, gambling 
in money or the necessaries of life or any of the 
thousand ways used to steal away his earnings; 
even bestows its highest attentions and favors upon 
those who do these things, and refuses, or neglects, 
even to look into the facts of the case, it ought not 
to wonder that he is irreligious. When our pro- 
fessed Christianity humbles itself as did the 
Master and seeks to lift up and bless these toiling 
ones it will find them eagerly listening to its teach- 
ings and no longer indifferent and irreligious. 

The success of the thousands of Christians that 
thus follow their Lord is certain proof that were 
all to follow their example, a brighter day would 
dawn upon the world. 

IMMORALITY. 

"London, May 11, 1886. — Thomas Gibney, whose 
name appears in the London directory under the 
description of 'gentleman,' was to-day arraigned 
in the Clerkenwell Police Court for violations of 
the criminal law amendments acts, resulting from 



204 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

the Pall Mall Gazette crusade. The charges 
against the prisoner are of haying procured since 
last December, for his violation, forty children 
under the age of consent. The girls were all the 
daughters of workingmen. The developments in 
the case have aroused intense indignation, and the 
authorities have had difj&culty in saving the pris- 
oner from the fury of the parents of his victims." 

In a community where live the very rich and the 
very poor, strict morality never has existed and 
never can exist. 

The gross immoralities revealed by the Pall 
Mall Gazette disclosures are inseparable from the 
state of society in which they exist. They may be 
covered up with a respectable exterior, but men 
who disregard the claims of God and the rights of 
men to get and hold property can not reasonably 
be expected to regard the rights of men or women 
in its enjoyment. Children accustomed to exact 
the utmost obedience from those whom they are 
taught to consider their inferiors, whose very being, 
in their account, seems to have no design beyond 
obedience to their w^hims and ministering to their 
every wish, can hardly be expected to stop at the 
line of morals where their passions are concerned. 

All over the United Kingdom where young aris- 
tocrats or children of the very wealthy summer or 
winter may be found the trail of the serpent, if we 
may trust the accounts of onlookers to the manor 
born. We are told in " Bread Winners Abroad " 



IMMORALITY. 205 

that tmmarried women among the nailmakers of 
England, who have children, find it easier to live 
than other women. Shame on a civilization, to say 
nothing of religion, that has produced such a state 
of affairs! 

Women of the peasant class from the other 
countries of Europe have low ideals of the moral 
purity that becomes their sex. 

It is said that the German government winks at 
the moral debasement of the servant girls of the 
realm. German soldiers can not afford to marry. 
The government pays them but a small sum for 
their services. 

Each of them takes up with a servant girl of the 
region where he happens to be stationed. He 
spends his evenings with her and she gives him 
his supper out of her master's cupboard. 

This proves a valuable arrangement to the gov- 
ernment as it saves a ration each day. 

In slavery times in our country, the fine lady 
who answered to the name wife, was often con- 
strained to acknowledge that she was only the first 
woman of her husband's harem, the other members 
of which were not as fair as herself. From what 
we know of the past we may safely assume, even 
though it has not been published in the papers, 
that the standard of morals is not high where the 
excessively poor and the very rich live in the same 
country. 



206 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PKEVENTION. 

If we are rightly informed the poor, half -fam- 
ished girls employed in some of the stores and 
shops of onr large cities are told that they must 
dress better, if they have to do so at the expense 
of virtue, or lose their places, which means distress 
if not starvation for themselves and, perhaps, for 
dependent loved ones. 

DEUNKENNESS. 

Drunkenness is both a cause and result of pov- 
erty. Few announcements are more common than 
that men were sober till they lost their property, 
when they began to drink and went rapidly down. 
This class of men furnishes a very large number 
of suicides. 

The increase of suicides seems almost to keep 
even pace with the number of failures in a country. 
When " God makes inquisition for blood," there 
will be a fearful reckoning for those who have, by 
means condemned by His law, " turned away the 
needy from their right," and thus tempted them to 
rush headlong into the ways of the destroyer. 

CEIME. 

Drunkenness, however caused, is the prolific 
source of nearly all the crime in the world. To do 
away with crime we must first do away with its 
causes. The saloon and its feeders, the genteel 
bar and the wine cellar must go. Wine is a great 
provocative to vice, as well as crime. Familiarity 



CRIME. 



207 



with Greek and Eoman Classics ouglit to convince 
anyone that wine and even beer have always been 
chief causes of crime. Tacitus says that the drunk- 
enness of the early Germans was caused by liquors 
rotted from wheat and barley. That this liquor 
made them drunk, and that the result of drinking 
it was often strife and murder. 

Perhaps, the first thing in restoring the reign of 
justice to this suffering earth is forever to destroy 
the terrible, satanic power of rum. 

With intellects sobered and hands steadied men 
may be able to see clearly the other foes of their 
peace and happiness and have strength to grapple 
them 1 3 the death. 

Agur in his prayer recognizes the fact that pov- 
erty is one of the great sources of crime. To do 
away with crime it is necessary to do away with' 
enforced and widespread poverty, such as we find 
everywhere to-day. 



CHAPTEE XIX. 

WHEN IS MONEY PLENTY? 

President Cleveland looks into the banks and 
sees vast piles of the nation's cnrrency, and says 
surely these hard times cannot be for lack of 
money. 

When the earth is parched and every plant dying 
for want of moisture, with just as much reason on 
looking into Lake Michigan, he might say all this 
death of vegetation cannot be for lack of moisture. 

There is no lack of water but it is not where it 
is available to save the life of vegetation. There 
niay be plenty of money but it is not where it is 
needed to pay for the products of labor or to pay 
wages. 

In the uncertainty of the times, arising from 
causes that have been repeatedly explained, the 
merchant or employer cannot borrow it with a rea- 
sonable expectation of being able to make the 
interest, to say nothing of getting pay for his own 
labor, and so dare not imperil what property he 
has to help himself and others. 

Just in proportion as money becomes plenty in 
banks and the coffers of usurers it becomes scarce 
in the pockets of the wealth producers, where it 
ought to be plenty. 

208 



WHEN IS MONEY PLENTY ? 209 

It is commonly supposed that low interest on 
call loans is an indication that money is plenty. 
On the contrary there is no more certain sign that 
that article is scarce where it ought to be plenty 
and plenty where it ought to be scarce. 

A careful examination of the facts will show 
that interest on call loans in New York reaches 
the lowest point as a rule when times are hardest 
among the people. Of course men do not lend on 
small interest when they can get a larger one, and 
money gathered into banks in times of pressure 
cannot be readily re-loaned except to persons in 
debt, so vast amounts have to lie idle, rather than 
suffer which, banks make loans on call, only on 
gilt-edged securities, at a very low rate. The 
greater the amount of idle money the lower the 
rate and the harder the times among the people. 

The bale|ul effects of a diminishing volume of 
money in circulation are thus graphically described 
in the report of the Silver Commission, which was 
composed half of Eepublicans and half Democrats: 

" Exchanges become sluggish because those who 
have money will not part with it for either prop- 
erty or service, for the obvious reason that money 
alone is increasing in value, while everything else 
is decreasing in price. 

This results in the withdrawal of money from 
circulation, and its deposit in great hoards where it 
can exert no influence on prices, 
u 



210 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PBEVENTION. 

Money in shrinking volume becomes the para- 
mount object of commerce instead of the benefi- 
cent instrument. Instead of mobilizing industry, 
it poisons and dries up its life currents. It is the 
fruitful source of political and social disturb- 
ances." 

In another place, referring to the effects of a 
shrinking volume of money in England and on the 
Continent in the early part of this century, they 
say: " Wherever and whenever the mutterings of 
discontent were hushed by the fear of increased 
standing armies, the foundations of society were 
honeycombed by powerful secret organizations." 

Surely these are facts to be pondered well in 
these times. 

AN OBJECT LESSON. 

There is no more beautiful object in nature than 
a majestic oak tree with its giant trunk and stately 
branches smooth and free from unsightly knots. 
But it seems a law of nature that the most valuable 
objects are the most subject to, and injured by, 
hurtful parasites. 

Let us now compare the State to such a tree, 
Let its trunk, firmly rooted in the ground, from 
which it gets its sustenance, represent the State, 
all of whose sustenance must come from the same 
source. 

The main branches we will suppose to be the 
great channels of trade ; the lesser branches 



WHEN IS MONET PLENTY ? 211 

and trades, the different maniifactiires and the 
growing points and leaves the bnsy-fingered 
human toilers. 

Call to mind again the facts stated by the Silver 
Commission, that money is the " very fiber of social 
organism, the vitalizing force of industry, the pro- 
toplasm of civilization and as essential to its exist- 
ence as oxygen is to animal life. 

Without money civilization could not have had 
a beginning; with a diminishing supply it must 
languish, and, unless relieved, finally perish." 

Money has sometimes fittingly been compared to 
a great river, the varied barks upon whose waters 
are the industries of the world. 

Draw off the waters of the river and you leave 
the helpless vessels to decay, stranded in the mud. 

Let us compare it to the vital juices or sap of 
the tree. If it is allowed to flow freely and is not 
in any way obstructed, it goes on taking water, 
nitrogen and iron, and whatever else it needs, from 
the earth's storehouse, and oxygen from the air, 
and in the laboratory of the leaves and growing 
points, manufactures them into food for bark and 
wood and leaves, and then conveys this food to the 
parts where it is needed for immediate consump- 
tion to sustain the economy of the tree. 

Let us now consider the effect upon the tree, of 
arresting the process of distribution and turning it 
away from the parts it was designed to nourish. 
Let an army of bark lice or other parasites pitch 



212 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PEEVENTION. 

their tents upon its branches and begin to puncture 
them and draw out this food prepared to sustain 
the tree, every owner of an orchard, or keen ob- 
server of nature, knows that the poor tree soon 
begins to hang out signals of distress, and if the 
spoilation continues, the death of the tree is only a 
question of time. Let us suppose that these squat- 
ter sovereigns, in addition to drawing enough of 
the sustenance of the tree to keep themselves 
reveling in luxury, begin to pile up about them- 
selves great piles of this plunder so that they may 
have abundant supplies for years to come, and may 
hand it down to future generations of parasites, 
and the beautiful tree, as seen in one-half of our 
illustration, * will soon present the unsightly dying 
condition seen in the other half. 

Oak apples, or as they are sometimes called, 
nut-galls, are occasioned by the puncture of a rob- 
ber insect, and if allowed to remain on the hardy 
oak, kill it. You have seen a wild plant having a 
round ball upon its smooth, slender stalk. Above 
this ball, instead of the usual vigorous growth, 
culminating in beautiful flowers and fruits or seeds, 
there is a dwarfed and feeble one, without vitality 
enough to even blossom. The secret is contained 
in the ball which is the home of a robber parasite. 
If, after he had caused his capacious mansion to 
be built his spoilation had ceased, he would not 
have seriously interfered with the development 
of the plant. 

* See Frontispiece. 



WHEN IS MONEY PLENTY ? 213 

Money used to accumulate property does no 
harm. 

Money hoarded, whether for usury or safety, and 
kept out of circulation for any considerable length 
of time, causes certain ruin. 

You will see men energetic and vigorous in their 
earlier years. They accumulate money by rightful 
business and at the same time they bless commu- 
nity by giving employment to others. A change 
comes over them. Their energy fails them. In- 
stead of being like the growing point and leaves, 
always producing more sustenance for the tree to 
keep it green and flourishing, they are like the de- 
cayed limb around the base of which the sub- 
stance of the tree is piled up in an unsightly knot. 
As activity ceases the limb sloughs off and only 
the knot remains. Such knots are rotten at heart 
usually, and in this particular, the frequent defal- 
cations of bank officers show that the analogy 
holds. 

Other usurers are like bark lice, in the earlier 
period of life they have activity enough to move 
about till they find a favorable place to suck, when 
they grow a shell over them, and the process of 
drawing blood begins. 

Please note one other fact about our tree. The 
growing points and leaves, the busy-fingered work- 
ers through the tree, are connected with the soil. 
Sever this connection end they die. So men, sev- 
ered from the soil, if not now, certainly in the 



214 NATIONAL SUICIDE AKD ITS PREVENTION. 

future, when land is all occupied and lias great 
value, and now, in large sections of the country, 
must experience a living death. 

There is no remedy but obedience to God's law, 
which strictly forbids both these practices, so 
hurtful to the State and ruinous to the happiness 
of men. 

Tn conclusion then, xet us remember that money 
plenty to overflowing in the government treasury 
and in banks, is not money plenty. 

Money is never plenty until it is plenty in the 
hands of those for whose express benefit it was 
created — the producers of all wealth — laborers 
and their employers and those who buy and sell. 



OHAPTEE XX. 

CONCLUSION. 

God says, " I will have mercy and not sacrifice." 
The slave-holder that thought to atone for the 
wrongs done to the image of God held in hopeless 
bondage, by selling a baby and putting the price 
of blood into the contribution box to help carry 
the gospel to the heathen, found out his mista ke 
in four years of terrible bloodshed that covered up 
his own loved ones from his sight beneath grassy 
mounds scattered over his loved "Sunny South." 

Let the industrial slave-holder take warning 
who thinks that by some great donation to a mis- 
sion fund, or college treasury, or some public or 
private benevolent enterprise he can square the 
account with the Almighty. In God's account to 
obey is .better than sacrifice," and He hates ' rob- 
bery for a burnt offering." ,, , ^^ 

The cause of the laboring man will be all-pow- 
erful when he learns to trust, not in organizations, 
secret or open, but in the Lord Jehovah, in whom is 
"everlasting strength;" who " executeth judg- 
ment for all the oppressed." If he expects His 
favor he must cease to be himself an oppressor by 
dictating to his fellows when, and for how mucli, 
they shall labor. ^^ 



216 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PEEVENTION. 

Let him learn to discriminate between his em- 
ployer, who may be the worst oppressed man in the 
community, and the money-lender, who is often 
the cause of the distress of employed and em- 
ployer alike. 

This may not be directly attributable to the 
amount of usury taken, but is more often the 
result of money-famine, caused by usurers hoard- 
ing the country's money and so knocking down the 
price and preventing the sale of products relied 
upon to furnish money to pay laborers. 

The laborer ought also to learn to hate his worst 
enemies, whiskey and tobacco. They not only 
cause him much distress, and sickness, and pov- 
erty, but they turn away from him much sympathy 
of uninformed, well-meaning people, who see the 
great waste and ruin caused by these, and that 
many laboring men use them, and rashly conclude 
that all his woes would be assuaged and he would 
see no want if he would let them alone. He ought 
also to husband well his political power and never 
vote as a devotee of party, for the nominees of 
parties controlled by the money-power, of whom 
Gen. Weaver said in Congress a few days ago: 
" We are all of the spirit of reform when we are 
before the people. In our several districts we 
are all reformers. Ah! yes; the poor laboring 
man's years are full of promise, and he says, after 
he has listened to these lavish assurances, ' I am 
going to vote for him; he is a good man, and I 
believe in him.' 



CONCLUSION. 217 

" But, Mr. Chairman, when we come into this 
House these things are all forgotten, and the great 
reformer in the district, when he gets here roars 
like a sucking dove. [Laughter.] Why? Be- 
cause if he enforces his particular views some 
other member in his own party says: *If you 
carry out that doctrine or pledge you cannot carry 
Pennsylvania, or you cannot carry New York or 
some other state.' Is not that true? There is no 
policy in either party; no purpose, nothing, I fear, 
but death and disintegration. Evils are rampant, 
but Congress is deaf and blind." 

We have tried to show that, of which we are 
most thoroughly convinced, that, for the good of a 
country far the most important question is that of 
money. To a proper understanding of it most of 
us have to conquer our prejudices and unlearn the 
teachings of a lifetime. 

It may confidently be asserted that the men who 
understand the horrible nature of any vice are not 
those who have lived lives stained and saturated 
by it. So the men who have practiced and pros- 
pered by the arts by which money is amassed, are 
not the most competent teachers of the justice 
and morality of such arts. Hitherto, the men who 
have taught the uprightness and morality of 
present financial conditions, are the men who, di- 
rectly or indirectly, reap all the money advantage 
of such teachings. Is it not time that the cheated 
and enslaved laboring masses began to listen to 



218 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PEEVENTION. 

the teaching, if not of disinterested teachers, at 
least of those who have interests in common with 
themselves? You don't ask advice of the jockey 
of whom yon are purchasing a horse, unless you 
wish to be cheated; why should you of party 
leaders whom you know to be more unreliable 
than horse jockeys? 

If only gold and silver can be money, then the 
Creator has yoked the prosperity, nay, the very 
existence of men to one or two commodities. Has 
made them practically almighty; when they are 
plenty His creatures are well supplied with all 
comforts and blessings He promises to His faithful 
children; when thej fail and diminish in quantity 
those comforts and blessings must dry up till men 
are reduced to barter and the condition of savages, 
in which but few people, comparatively, can live 
on the face of the earth, and they sunk in super- 
stition and vice. 

Our Supreme Court says it is the duty of Con- 
gress to provide a currency, and, of course, a suf- 
ficient currency, for the country. If so, the money 
power cannot be limited to two commodities that 
may entirely desert the circulation and the coun- 
try, as gold and silver did England's currency du- 
ring her wars with Napoleon, and as they did ours 
during the rebellion. If Congress has no power 
to pass a law changing the conditions of contracts, 
which we do not admit, but which is generally 
maintained by those taking an opposite view, 



CONCLUSION. 219 

surely private individuals have no such right. As 
we have shown, Congress has repeatedly, at the 
instigation of bankers and bondholders, changed 
the conditions of payment, greatly to their loss, 
against the soldier, who saved the country, and 
against the tax-payer, who pays the score. We go 
further now, and charge that these same men have 
often done the same thing themselves, and in doing 
so have caused measureless wreck and ruin of 
other people's fortunes. They themselves are 
conscious of having the power, and even boast of 
it. Some three years ago, when Congress was dis- 
cussing the refunding act, they said pass the three 
per cent, refunding bill and they would retire 
1200,000,000 of the currency and cause the great- 
est panic the country ever saw. This dreadful 
power of making money plenty or scarce at will 
has been given by a Congress made up of bankers 
and their attorneys, to the banks. As we have 
shown repeatedly, they do not scruple to use this 
power for their own advantage, to the very great 
loss of all other people, and in doing so to change 
the conditions of payment of every debtor in the 
nation; but if anybody proposes any legislation in 
favor of the oppressed wealth producers of the 
country they cry "repudiation," and plead pit- 
eously for vested rights and against the wrong of 
changing the terms of payment of existing con- 
tracts. Their secret is out, and the cry of " woK J 
wolf ! " will not scare people much longer. 



220 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

John Sherman said in 1869: " The contraction of 
the currency is a far more distressing thing than 
senators suppose. * * * To every person ex- 
cept a capitalist out of debt, or a salaried officer or 
an annuitant, it is a period of loss, danger, lassitude 
of trade, fall of wages, suspension of enterprise, 
bankruptcy and disaster." Eemember that by ex- 
press act of Congress our National banks can in- 
augurate such a state of affairs at any moment and 
it is often to their interest to do so; that it is one 
of the chief objections against usury that it gives 
to a class of men proverbially heartless and selfish 
such power even without an act of Congress. 

On the 17th of March, 1874, John A. Logan said 
of the panic of 1873: " But, sir, that the panic was 
not due to the character of the currency is proved 
by the history of the panic itself. * * No sir, 
the panic was not attributable to the character of 
the currency, hut to a money famine, and to noth- 
ing else! In the the very midst of the panic we 
saw the leading bankers and business men of New 
York pressing and urging the President and the 
Secretary of the Treasury to let loose twenty or 
twenty-five millions more of the same paper for 
their relief. The very same men who to-day de- 
nounce it as a disgrace to our government. It 
was good enough when they were in trouble." 

In this connection let us see further what some 
of our foremost men have said about another set 
of these same monstrous, unfeeling tyrants, whose 



CONCLUSION. 221 

power to injure, great as it undoubtedly is, is less 
than that of the usurer. 

Garfield says of the great railroad and other cor- 
porations: *' Already they have captured the oldest 
and strongest of them (the states) and these dis- 
crowned sovereigns follow in chains the triumphal 
car of their conquerers. * * * The modern 
barons, more powerful than their military proto- 
types, own our greatest highways, and levy tribute 
at will upon all our great industries." 

Hon. Wm. Windom, Secretary of the Treasury, 
under Garfield, said: "I repeat to-day words ut- 
tured seven years ago, that there are in this coun- 
try four men who in the matter of taxation possess, 
and frequently exercise, powers which Congress 
nor any of our state legislatures would dare to ex- 
ert; powers which, if exercised in Great Britain, 
would shake the throne to its very foundations. 
These men may at any time, and for any reasons 
satisfactory to themselves, by a stroke of the pen, 
reduce the value of property in the United States 
by hundreds of millions of dollars. They may at 
their own will and pleasure disarrange and embar- 
rass business, depress one city or locality and. build 
up another, enrich one individual and ruin his 
competitors, and when complaint is made coolly 
reply, 'What are you going to do about it?' " 

One of Wall Street's great operators, Hon. Eeu- 
ben Hatch, who, probably knows what he is talking 
about as well as any man living, speaks of Van- 



222 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PREVENTION. 

derbilt, Gould, Sage and Field as the " f onr Kings 
of York." He says, " These men wonld be better 
designated as the head-centres of Communism, 
for while Justice Schwab only wants a fair divide, 
these men grab the whole pot. These men are the 
promoters of labor strikes and the prime cause of 
all the antagonism between capital and labor. * * 
Jay Gould's first financial stroke was when he man- 
ufactured Erie common stock out of manufactured 
convertible bonds, fed the street with it, and then 
emigrated to Jersey City with $14,000,000. Com- 
modore Vanderbilt issued the New York Central 
85 per cent, dividend, ($40,000,000), in Horace 
Clark's dining room. * * * Finally, when these 
millions of additional stock and bonds, which have 
been issued to themselves and placed in their 
own tin boxes, have caused an advance in rates 
of transportation and a decline in wages, they 
elect or buy up judges, whom they can now get 
cheaper than a first-class lawyer, and their high- 
way robbery justified by courts held in their own 
private offices and parlors." 

Judge Black says: "These corporations have, 
in effect, seceded from the Union and formed a 
government of their own, which they call, not the 
Confederate States but the Confederate Railroads. 
* * With this machinery the Confederate Rail- 
roads make, administer and execute their own 
laws, tax their subjects without restraint or limita- 
tion, and 'exercise in the fullest extent the supreme 



CONCLUSION. 223 

authority to regulate commerce with foreign na- 
tions and among the several States'." 

If comment were necessary upon the above, 
both comment aud illustration may be found in the 
recent strike on the Gould lines in the Southwest. 
Surely the secret methods of the Knights of La- 
bor, in their attempts to defend their interests, are 
no worse than the same methods first resorted to 
by money kings to oppress them. 

That both are wrong, I freely grant. 

That the laborer may get some present advan- 
tage by a resort to war measures, is probably true; 
but the bringing in of that better time when the 
right of him that produces all things to the best 
the land affords shall be freely granted, is one of 
the triumphs of peace which cannot be hastened 
by such measures, except as they are overruled by 
an Almighty hand, which is among the possibili- 
ties. 

In the minds of many good people a resort to 
them prejudices the case and turns away sympa- 
thy, especially if resort to an oath is had, which is 
the highest act of worship, and by which men 
seek in vain to make God a party to the violation 
of His own law. Not only is this offensive to 
many good men but it must be displeasing to God 
himself, without whose favor no man can long 
prosper. 

When men cease to sell the land contrary to 
God's law and to hoard their money and loan it, 



224 NATIONAL SUICIDE AND ITS PKEVENTION. 

which he has strictly forbidden; but when they 
labor with it, going into business themselves, 
either as open or silent partners and sharing the 
losses as well as the profits, losses will be few, and 
there will be no more strikes nor labor troubles, 
for all men will be able either to find employment 
or make it for themselves. The nation that will 
not do this will not obey God and will certainly be 
destroyed, for He has said by the month of His 
prophet Jeremiah: " But if they will not obey, I 
will utterly pluck up and destroy that nation, saith 
the Lord." 






>^ll 



M:^4i^c^^^ 




ttel-Mi.^ t >d .Ux V^ U,: VA.L 






"^qfe^T^ 






tlSSIW^^ 



^i^Wv/^^' 



\f^ 



Si 









mj^]^:vr^yp 






'jy»^j 






!!«?: 



p^ 



mm 



1^ 



ifil^T^f^TF 



- ®— -f ^■— #•— ^x^- — ^ 






'ip¥® 




—-■V — <3*-- 









v_N (^ (_ ^ ^ ^ 9~^ <> ^^K ^- \ ^ -X ®- \ -■ *^- 



r '« ■ c- 



i^piji: 



^^t,/k2! iW.v:^ 1 ^ >-^4l^< ^I^s -^i^N' -it^-^ >^^^ 



iWiSi 






m 



